Tau Ceti IV
by Youssii
Summary: Several days ago, the colony on the sweltering planet of Tau Ceti IV stopped all communications. With human crew unable to cope with the heat, Kirk sends down Spock and another crew member to investigate. A distress message from the other crew member arrives saying that she is about to die, and that she has lost Spock, Jim must decide what to do to get his First Officer back. K/S
1. A Lost Colony

**Warnings: This story deals with mature and sometimes disturbing themes and events, including: Addiction, parasitic/rabies like illnesses, surgical gore and surgery without anaesthesia, sex, mildly dubious consent, graphic violence, minor character death, descriptions of corpses.**

That said, it's not a Saw III style gore fic or a porn without plot/ erotica, but it draws on aspects that younger readers and anyone with a personal experience of these things might find disturbing.

**Image credit: art/an-alien-planet-free-source-62504836 An Alien Planet by hoevelkamp**

Summary:

Set just after Into Darkness (in Abrams' alternate universe)  
K/S, S/U, slight Sulu/Pavel and Uhura/McCoy; contains both M/M and het relationships

Several days ago, the colony on the sweltering planet of Tau Ceti IV stopped all communications. (Set 27 years before the Tau Ceti IV of the other universe's Wrath of Khan)  
With human crew unable to cope with the heat, Kirk sends down two more capable crew members to investigate - Spock, and to Spock's horror a young communications lieutenant who is half betaziod, an empath capable of reading his otherwise carefully guarded emotions.  
When a distress message from the betazoid arrives telling him that she is about to die, and that she has lost Spock, Jim must decide what to do to get his First Officer back.  
With Spock deep in the Pon Farr and Uhura unavailable, the pair find themselves in a difficult situation - but the bigger threat of uncovering a top secret and highly illegal Section 31 mission looms dark on the horizon.

Chapter 1

Uhura stepped from the turbolift and out onto the main bridge. People milled around and the display showed the ellipse of the Earth, hanging, unsupported, in the vast expanse of space. She said a silent farewell to her home planet and moved towards her station.

Spock brushed past her on the way to his seat, and she caught him by the arm to stay him. He turned to face her wordlessly, and returned her kiss with a calculated movement. He didn't fully understand the link between their love and this particular activity, and it always seemed to her that it required a great deal of effort for him to perform it, especially in such an open place, but the kiss was nonetheless a real one, with real affection behind it. Her hand rested on the blue fabric that covered his shoulder for a beat longer, before she released him and they both took up their places.

It pleased her to no end that he was willing to kiss her with people to watch, awkward and mechanical as always, but an admission to all who saw that he did feel and he did love her, despite a lifetime of burying emotion beneath logic. It wasn't a cold logic, she knew; he was compassionate even at his most analytical, but it was not the warm emotion of a human.

She checked the communications displays, all normal, and turned her attention to Kirk.

"All right everybody," he announced. "We are making our way to Tau Ceti IV, it's a class H planet with a large mining colony, and all communications with them were lost two days ago. It's probably just storm or something and they'll be back up in no time but we're going to check it out before it becomes a situation."

He pressed a button, and the officers in the room went back to their tasks, assured that his next sentence was not for them. "Scotty, are were ready to go?"

Uhura relayed their departure to Earth, and within minutes they were at departing the solar system at full impulse. When they were far enough from any objects to switch to warp six for cruising and her services were no longer required, she stood and relieved herself from her post, abandoning her lover to his conversation with their captain to make her way to her own cabin. She intended to take the shower she'd missed that morning, but wished she'd bathed in real water before coming aboard for months of sonic showers and flannel washes.

"It's not that young a colony," Jim mused, "It must be old enough to have secure communication links, what is it, 40 years old?"

"Fifty three," Spock corrected his captain.

"Damn, that's even older than you."

Spock bristled internally, and could tell that Jim knew it even though he carefully kept his face empty of emotion. "I am twenty nine. I am only three years older than you, Captain." he reminded him. Jim only smiled.

"That would make you almost thirty by my count." He said stubbornly.

"Twenty nine is almost thirty," Spock replied, as though the human was unaware of this piece of information.

Jim chuckled, and continued with what he had been saying. "Yeah, well either way that's more than old enough to set up a system that a storm shouldn't damage. There are almost 7,000 people on that planet. I wonder what happened."

"An ionic storm could perhaps block their signal," he supposed. "But it would have to be a severe storm in order to prevent them from launching a shuttle to send a distress signal from above the atmosphere."

"Well," the captain said, "We've got another 11 days of this left, I'd rest up if I were you – I was thinking of sending you down as part of the landing party, I think you might be the only one who can stand the heat!"

Spock nodded, and stood up. "Then if you please, I would go and eat something."

"Of course," Jim said as he left, turning back to the display to watch the tiny points of light edge their past; smiling at the thought of his younger, naive self, fancying himself a captain sailing his great ship through the ocean of stars.


	2. Controlled Communications

It had been three days since they left Earth, and Spock could not sleep. He lay awkwardly on his side along the edge of Nyota's bunk. Although it was uncomfortable, Spock knew that usually he was able to sleep in this position, but this night he conceded it was illogical to do so. Whilst he was asleep, the cramped arrangements did not disturb him, but as he lay awake watching the faint blue light of some control pad somewhere play off Nyota's skin, he was uncomfortable aware of his locked shoulders and the pressure on his right hip.

Before he got up, he ran his left hand down her nude side, splayed in a Vulcan salute, enjoying the soft feel of her skin, and the curve above her hip. It was not an movement he would naturally have performed, but he had once been vaguely aware of her doing the same for him when she awoke in the night, and had found the sensation pleasant. He covered her with the blanket for which he had been a replacement, and softly padded away, taking his shoes to put on outside the door so as not to wake her with his footsteps.

He loved her deeply, he thought as he slipped on his shoes in the hallway. Deeply, but with great restraint. Indeed, he loved her all the more that she accepted his stiff embraces and respected that the tiny gestures of human affection he showed were in fact immense to him. She did not expect from him the exhausting physicality that Jim and his girl friends exchanged. The thought of sleeping with multiple women whom he barely knew frightened him, although not enough to shake his calm.

He wondered as he wandered, what it must be like to be with Jim. He shook the thought off. The mechanics of such intercourse were known to him, but even the few times he had coupled with Uhura had been delicate and abstemious, even on her part. Nyota was gentle to him, and he doubted greatly whether he would have allowed himself to partake in such an act had she not guided him so lovingly through it. He did not need the same guidance the second time, but expressing his lust was most certainly not a second nature to him.

As he walked aimlessly through the hallways and down an emergency stair well whose alarm he deactivated automatically, his thoughts turned to her comforting him after the death of his mother. He had not known, then, how to express such a profound grief. The thought took his metaphorical hearth from his chest, swollen from thoughts of Nyota's love, and crushed it, dropping it like a stone into the pit of his belly.

He did not cry as he emerged from the stair well and reactivated the alarm, although the low lighting would have hidden it if he had. He ground his teeth imperceptibly, willing himself to lose the building emotion. His poor human mother had died, and there was no one to cry for her. His father admitted his love, but was too well disciplined to imagine doing such a thing. If she's been there to see it, what would it have been like for her, an emotional human surrounded by Vulcans, so cold they were sometimes read as cruel.

The idea of his mother being so isolated even after her death sparked emotions even he could not ignore.

Spock stopped dead in the darkened corridor, suddenly desperate for the tear to flow.

Mother, he whispered to himself. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry no one mourned you. He sank down against the wall and sobbed for a minute, breathing deep ragged breaths that hurt his chest and made his head dizzy. He held a lungful of air in for quite some time, until the verging panic subsided, and wiped at his eyes and running nose. Control. He thought. I am in control of my emotions.

Finally he managed to regain most of his composure, although he still felt sick with guilt. He walked again, and found himself on an upper deck in main engineering. Below him, the boy Chekov snored softly in a chair, dead to the world. Deciding the boy was unlikely to notice him, he settled down on the floor, his knees to his chest, and fiddled with his communicator. Taking off the back panel, he began to disassemble it, slowly, piece by piece, until all that remained was the magnet and the wires going into the in-ear phone itself, as though trying to remember the order to put them back in. He knew it by heart. Break it down and build it up. He said, too low for even his own ear to pick up. I am in control. Break it down and built it up.

James Tiberius Kirk strolled the darkened hallways of his ship like a stalking animal, perhaps one of the now extinct big black cats that used to roam on Earth. He'd decided that tonight he did not need to sleep, but wanted instead to explore. Perhaps in the morning he would take them up to warp speed 8 for a while. A few years ago, an hour at the observation deck had the power to satify that need, but now he longed to be on the alien planet's surface, observing its strange animals and the variety of people it must surely contain. For the moment he contented himself with strolling down the darkened passageways, consoled that they looked different with the dimmed lighting that was failing to tell his body clock it was night.

He walked with a surety rarely afforded to any man, or any one of any other gender for that matter. His destiny was secure about him, his friends and loved ones safe, and he was heading to a new adventure.

Glancing through a window in one of the doors to his right, he caught sight of someone sat huddled on the opposite platform of the engineering deck. Not wanting to startle whoever it was, he walked around the passage on the outside until he reached that door. Peering through a nearby window, he realised it was Spock, immersed in some sort of detailed work with a now dismantled piece of equipment.

When the door slid open and Kirk stepped through it, Spock did not look up. For a moment he simply stood there, watching his colleague apparently ignoring him.

There was an unusual puffiness around the half-Vulcan's eyes, and whilst his face betrayed no emotion, there seemed to be a resigned nature to the way he worked with the machine. Finally he had taken everything from the little ear piece housed his communicator. He was about to make a comment about damaging equipment, but thought better of it when Spock still did not look at him, instead picking the last component he had removed and slowly fitting it back in to the rounded box which house the main reciever.

Kirk slotted himself in next to his friend, somewhat squashed between Spock's shoulder and the wall, his back to the railingd, and handed him the next piece. He took it without word, and connected it back to the first, engrossed in the delicate work.

Suddenly Spock heaved a huge sigh, and Kirk realised that this was the best the young man could do to show emotion around him. He placed a hand behind Spock where there was a gap in the safety railings, and rubber his upper back awkwardly. Spock was not someone he knew how to calm down, but then the Vulcan was hardly not calm. He accepted the somewhat uncomfortable attempt at hugging him though, and kept intently at his work.

After another minute, Kirk handed the little back panel of the communicator to him, and he clicked it back into place with a juddering sigh that suggested he may have been crying earlier.

Knowing he was meant to do something, but made awkward by association with the logical First Officer, he squeezed his back gently and allowed them to sit there another minute. Then he strained to push himself up and offered a hand to Spock, who took it and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.

After they passed through the sliding door, blocking out Chekov's quiet snores, he looked at his companion. "Are you okay? Did something happen?"

There was a moment before Spock gave his measured reply. "I am quite alright. I could not sleep. And you Jim? You are up very late also."

"Ah," he smiled at him. "I'm fine, just checking up on... The ship."

He knew Spock was lying about having been fine, but somehow he felt that Spock knew he was aware of this also, and was surprised at how pleased he was that the young Vulcan had allowed him to be of comfort whilst he recovered from his unfortunate foray into emotion.

Spock had been slightly horrified when Jim came out onto the balcony with him. He had feared that the man would ask things of him, or be annoyed about his communicator, which was lying in parts about his person. But the silent offer of companionship had comforted him, and lifted the stone from his belly again.

Maybe Jim had not realised it, but when he handed him those few components, he had aided in Spock's own private metaphor for building himself back up again, and it felt good to be supported in that, just as it did when Jim offered him moral support at other times.

Something had confused him about the touch on his back, but he reassured himself that it was simply meant as a kind gesture, and allowed the lingering warmth of another person caring for him to take him off to bed; it was logical, after all, now that he was feeling better, that he should rest before the days ahead.


	3. Tau Ceti IV

Tau Ceti's sky swirled with red dust like a planet on fire. Spock's supposition had been correct; an ionic storm raged across much of the planet's northern hemisphere, choking it, and preventing any message being sent out or any shuttle being sent up.

Heat signatures showed that the surface temperature of the planet at latitudes further north than 30° were currently "only" around 50° C, but beneath the storm, at the equator, it was now 68°, far hot for any human crew member to attempt to traverse on foot.

As he'd imagined, Kirk had no choice but to beam down Spock and Lieutenant Hayves, a half Betazoid, half genetically manipulated human whom he could tell made Spock anxious, although he didn't show it. The problem was, that whilst he didn't need to show it for Jim, as a long time friend to know, he also did not need to show it for Hayves to know. Mercifully for Spock, she was not a telepath, only an empath by virtue of only being half Betazoid. Kirk had been somewhat afraid that his deeply private friend would actually refuse to go with a woman from a culture in which the entire concept or privacy was so alien that children had their weddings naked in front of family, and everyone knew exactly what each other thought at any given moment. However, he soon realised that he was a fool to expect prejudice from one who had faced so much of it for his own mixed heritage, and regretted the thought.

And so he was not surprised when Spock entered the transporter room looking more guarded than ever, as though a poker face would keep the Lieutenant's mental powers at bay, to stand on the pad of white light. Hayves was tall and plump with long frizzy hair and brown skin. She stepped up onto the pad next to the blank faced Vulcan and smiled at Kirk, taking a sip from a large bottle of water which she sensibly carried for the trek. It would take them six days to reach the site of the colony, if they could keep up the pace in such a heat, and Kirk hoped Spock had some food and water too in his back pack. Of course he does.

He smiled back, and saw Spock's mouth twitch, although he did not think it was a sense of humour turning up the corners of the vulcan's mouth.

Uhura walked in at that moment, to embrace him goodbye. Kirk could swear he saw Spock smelling her clothes. It took him a moment longer than he'd've liked for him to decide that their closeness didn't bother him.

Chekov flustered excitedly about the controls, pushing button and confidently ignoring the flashing red light which popped up when he set the coordinates.

"I'm getting closer to the colony, Captain!" He exclaimed proudly, his thick accent making him sound even more earnest than he'd intended. "Machine says I cannot do it, but I can do it!"

Kirk was somewhat displeased at the prospect of relying on Chekov's estimates rather than the precise calculations of the computer, but he trusted the man and let him have his way.

"Goodbye Hayves, Spock." He said, and they were engulfed in a haze of spun gold and disappeared.

Uhura stood still in front of the console for a second after they were gone. Then she turned and said aloud, "Sometimes I wish I could ask her what he was feeling," and before Kirk could tell if she were saying it to him or to herself, she left.

"Don't we all?" Muttered McCoy, brushing past her on his way in.

Kirk did not reply. He was thinking of the night a week ago, when Spock had let him witness his struggle to control his emotions, and realised that he did not wish for Hayves insight; he knew all that he needed to know.

Kayla Hayves gasped when her lungs filled with the scalding air of Ceti IV. The humidity was mercifully low, but the air felt horribly hot nonetheless. For a second she could feel the shock of the heat on the man beside her, but he quickly repressed it and she lost her ability to read his feelings again. She squinted against the high wind, thankful for its cooling effect, and looked up to the red sky above them. The dust was high and the air below clear, but it was so thick to the north of them that the day appeared to be black.

Commander Spock surprised her in how well he was able to shield her from his emotions, simply by refusing to feel them himself. In a moment before they had been beamed down, she picked up a hint of indignation, she supposed at herself for her ability to read his feelings. She wondered if perhaps he was able to feel her attempting to access them. Had she been raised anywhere but Betazoid she might have been embarrassed, but her lack of privacy had been so complete for most of her life that she was not bothered by the prospect of him knowing of her attempts.

She took a swig of the water, but felt as though it immediately leaked back out onto her skin as sweat. Spock look for all intents and purposes as dry and cool as he had on the ship.

"We are on the planet surface now, Jim," he was forced to shout into the communicator over the whistle of the storm.

"That's good, Mister Spock," the Captain replied. "You should have contact with us for at least the next few hours, but Chekov managed to get you closer than we thought we'd be able to – it's a three and a half day walk from here. I advise you try and get that half a day done this afternoon before sun down."

"Very well, Jim. We will begin now."

"Alright. I want you to find a way to communicate with us as soon as you get there, you copy? Even if you have to walk all the way back, I wanna know everything's okay. Kirk out."

After a moment he turned to her expectantly. "Shall we?" he asked, gesturing at the direction in which they were meant to go.

"Of course," she replied, and they began the long journey north.

The heat was painful, even to Spock. His body increased blood flow and rushed to cool itself, but he could not help but let an invisible shudder at the shear surprise of it go through him. He was sure it was not lost on Lieutenant Hayves, but there was little to be done about it after the fact.

Now four hours later, and he could see her body was drenched in sweat. He believed that he himself had risen in temperature to perhaps thirty three degrees. However, in the time that they'd been moving the temperature had dropped a few degree.

His communicator bleeped, in perfect working order in spite of its recent reassembly.

"Mister Spock do you copy?" It was Jim's voice.

"Jim?" he said simply.

"Alright, we reckon we're gonna lose you pretty soon, so let's stick to the plan. There are some unusual readings coming from the north, but we can't tell if it's just distortion from the storm. You find a way to tell us if it turns out to be something. If in four days time we haven't heard from you, we'll send a search party out, okay?"

Looking for confirmation from Hayves, he responded, "Understood. We will be making camp soon, so it may be possible for us to stay in contact until tomorrow morning. If so I will attempt to talk to you before we set off tomorrow, but I would not worry if we are unable to do so. Is this acceptable?"

"Sounds fine. Good luck Mister Spock, Uhura sends her love," Jim's voice replied, earnestly.

"Thank you Jim. Spock out." he responded, smiling internally.

When he turned to face Hayves he saw her watching him, and knew that she had felt his affection for both Jim and Nyota.

"We carry on," he told her. "We'll make camp a mile north of here." And trudged on past her without another word.


	4. Camping Out

The On the third morning, Hayves awoke groggily and stumbled out of her one person tent. She felt nothing, as per usual, from the Vulcan in his own tent. She knew that he needed less sleep than she. Presumably he made sure to be awake before she rose to ensure that she was unable to intrude on any emotions he may feel in his sleep – although she imagined, privately, that he lacked the imagination to have a dream self very much different from his waking demeanour, if he did dream, and when he did he probably kept himself as devoid of feeling as when he was awake. He wasn't bad, she knew; when she did feel emotion from him, it was affection for someone else, or a feeling of resentment toward her, but no animosity whatsoever. Still, she was getting tired of him. They had not been able to contact the Enterprise the next morning, and his company, whilst intended to be quiet and companionable was strained by the immense effort he was investing in crushing his emotions. If only he had not had to sacrifice decent conversation for the cause. She thought.

Without shame or any nervousness, she undressed outside the tent from the light sleeping gown she'd worn to bed, grateful that the sun for the past two days had been obscured by the thick storm above. It had cooled significantly and was now around 54 degrees, back within what she considered comfortable with the aid of course of her mother's altered genetic make up.

She took a pre-dampened wash cloth from a water-proof pouch just inside her tent door and began to wash herself, cleansing off the sweat of the night. It was a poor attempt; the damp spongey cloth had already been used the previous two mornings, and it was mostly smearing the sweat and grime more evenly across her body, but it cooled her a little and she was pleased she'd brought it.

When she had dressed again in her uniform, which was a little stiff from her dried sweat and definitely chafing at her arm pits, she looked about.

It was unlike Spock to have not got up by this point, although she knew, from a brief grip of shock on the first morning, that he was not comfortable to find her naked, and had perhaps wisened to her routine.

When after five minutes he did not emerge from his tent, she went and shook it from the outside.

"Commander?" She shouted at it. The tent did not reply.

Almost ripping off the closures to open it, she found it empty. Spock's bag and supplies were still inside.

"Shit," she said to the tent. "SHIT! Where are you Commander?"

It did not reply. It was a tent.

"Spock!" she called. "Commander Spock!" Desperately she fumbled for her communication device and called into it, only to hear her voice echoed by Spock's communicator from within the tent.

She circled the area of their camp, wishing they'd camped on the softer sand fifty meters to the east. At least then he would have left foot prints.

Becoming paranoid, she grabbed for her phaser, but no target materialised. She aimed at the tent instead, furious at its lack of useful information. In the end she didn't fire, expecting that Spock might need it when he cared to turn up again. She sat inside her own tent, until the heat of the day brought it to a sweltering temperature that even she could not bear. For a moment she thought perhaps he had caught heat stroke and wandered off to die, but then remembered that it had been only 48° in the night, and that as a part Vulcan he was designed to be more suited to the heat.

Packing up her tent she pondered what she could do. In her back pack was a single rocket, pre-programmable with a single message to be fired above the cloud. She could use it, and then take Spock's with her to the colony. But, she thought, what if he returns and needs it? Sighing, she realised that she would have to continue on without him. She could reach the colony and then combine her message of his absence with her findings when she arrived. If Spock returned, he would surely head north after her, and contact her with his communicator.

Miserably she began to trudge northwards towards the colony she could see glinting far in the distance.


	5. Where Spock Isn't

Uhura sat at her post, attempting to contact the colony for the Nth time. Spock and Hayves had not responded since Kirk's last message, and despite it being only three days, and doubtful that they had even reached the colony yet, she felt a rising anxiety in her gut.

Kirk, on the other hand seemed somewhat immune to this. He was in the lounge beating Scotty at 3D chess a third time that day, leaving McCoy to sit in his seat and do what little needed to be done in orbit, which it turned out was mostly conversing with her.

"So, how did you two, you know, get together?" He asked her with feigned disinterest. The real question, of course, was how on Earth, or indeed anywhere else in the galaxy, did someone enter into a relationship with one such as Spock.

"I was his student. I asked him on a date, and he accepted." She said simply. She had been so horrified when the words came out of her mouth that she almost failed to understand his words when he had responded that it would be "most pleasant" to do so. Still, even she had not expected his attempts to assign her to a different ship after his own appointment to the Enterprise. She was lucky, she supposed, that he had allowed her to persuade him otherwise.

"So, did he already have a crush on you, or..?" McCoy let the question hang casually, although he looked at the controls in front of him intently, as though they actually required any of his attention.

"I don't know," she replied. "I think he likes me now, but I was never really sure of the start point."

"Of course he likes you now," McCoy forgot not to let his curiosity show. "I'd say he loved you, even if it's hard to believe he's capable of such a thing. Good luck getting him into bed!"

Uhura said nothing; it occurred to her that to the rest of the crew members, he was about as sexual now as he'd ever been - not at all - and that it might actually be beyond them to imagine him in bed with anyone. She realised that she had once thought like that, too.

Apparently she'd left that silence too long, and McCoy turned to her with an eyebrow raised almost above his hair line. She pretended not to notice, secretly satisfied at her hardly subtle advertisement of their sexuality, in a way which would have horrified Spock were he there.

Unfortunately for Spock, he was not there.

He awoke somewhat confused and dazed from an uncomfortable sleep in a place cool and so dark that it took even his eyes a minute to adjust. He pushed himself into a sitting position, his hand slipping in something wet and almost causing him to fall. He was dizzy, disoriented, and his arm felt hot and inflamed.

When his eyes finally focused, he looked down at the arm to find it wounded and festering. Flesh had been torn from it and it his uniform was ripped crudely open mid-way up his forearm. There looked as if there were tooth marks in the skin. He bit back panic for a few seconds, thankful that the green coppery blood had become sticky and clotted, and he was in no danger of dying from blood loss.

There was little more he could do in this darkness, he decided, and forced himself to stand, ignoring the aching joints and nausea which threatened to topple him. He could not recall acquiring the injury, or coming to this place.

The cave was lit only by a glowing substance on one wall, probably a simple life form, and it seemed that Spock was contained within one long winding passage. It would be logical for him to find his way outside; lieutenant Hayves would be anxious about him now. He reached for his communicator. It was not there. Nothing to be done for it then, but to seek out the exit and hope that he was not too far behind her.

After three hours of going down passage way after passage way, the cave had not opened out, and Spock began to panic. It was irrational, he knew, but the emotion came unbidden from nowhere. He was furious at being stuck within the cave, desperate for the outside world. Pummeling his fists against the cave wall did nothing.

"Arrgh!" He yelled, kicking a delicate crystal formation growing up from the floor of the cave. It shattered into tiny grains of salt. Why was he so angry? He stormed off in yet another random direction, trying to find a passage that led up, or perhaps to an underground river that must surely have created it.

Walking down yet another stone corridor, he caught a glimpse of his own arm in the eerie glow of the slime on the walls, and noticed that a few inches above his wound was a small lump in his arm.

His hands shaking with fury, he pulled at the fabric of his shirt and ripped it to above the protrusion. There in his arm, a vein was swollen, as though plugged with something. When he put a finger out to touch the lump, immense pain erupted from it.

He hissed and grit his teeth against it, using the rock for support, but then felt himself flood with relaxation, and sank down the wall. He smiled at the lump in his arm. It was lovely.


	6. Distress Call

**Reminder that all content warnings at at the beginning of Chapter 1 and should be read before continuing: this story contains frightening and sexual themes and deals with addiction and illness.**

Midday arrived and Hayves pushed on towards the colony, eating her rations as she moved. It was getting darker as she neared the colony, and now she was just 6 miles away. The storm seemed, if anything, to have worsened; her visibility of the huge compound which housed 6,600 of the 6,700 people on the planet was now barely in her range of vision. Buffeted by the wind, she found sand and dust getting into her eyes, but did not stop to rinse them. Behind her she heard a noise, like an animal's cry. It's the wind, she told herself. It's the wind. Keep on going.

So she did, blinking away the sand and trying to ignore the little red dots in the corner of one eye. The particles in the air made it burn her skin slightly, but like her vision, McCoy would be able to fix that when she got back to the ship.

For now she continued, reigning in her fears, determined to make it to the colony.

Jim glanced over at Uhura, observing her anxious pacing. "He'll be fine," he wanted to tell her. Last night he would have done so, but this afternoon he was beginning to worry as well. The massive storm covered 31% of the northern hemisphere of Tau Ceti IV; an area greater than that of the continent on which he was born. The meteorologists down in their lab had assured him that no such events had occurred in the planet's atmosphere in the last 143 years, when records began to be kept on its weather conditions. In fact, the ions in the storm were mostly heavier elements, not known to be stored in any great quantities within the planet's lithosphere.

For all intents and purposes, someone had introduced 4,000 tons of various positive ions, which were scrambling the electrics of any device within it, and the signals of anything trying to transmit through it. It was sabotage.

It was getting to the point where he was beginning to worry that the planet had been quietly invaded.

He regretted sending down only two officers, and secretly he regretted that one of them was Spock. Kirk hated to lose any of his crew, but the idea of losing Spock was something else.

Where would he be, he thought, without the Vulcan to keep him in shape? And would he even want to be there? He shuddered involuntarily. Losing Spock was not an option.

"Bones," he said, turning to McCoy. "How long can someone survive in that cloud?"

"What, before they disintegrate away? Minutes. The acid will melt you." He concluded. "But the cloud is high up for such a fierce storm. Someone on the ground I'd say a week before you were incapacitated, maybe two before you were dead."

He looked worriedly at Kirk. "We won't let it come to that, Bones." He said. But he could feel sweat beading on the back of his neck which was not due to climate control.

For no apparent reason, Uhura felt irritable. Perhaps it was her anxiety about Spock, but she was used to both of them being separated on dangerous missions. There was no reason why this should not be the case now.

She felt that she would know if he had died, but was suddenly horrified that the thought had even sprung to her mind. She had done thirty, forty, fifty more dangerous things with him, and the thought only occurred to her when she could see him in genuine danger. Standing on the brink of death was something he accepted with a calm that made him vulnerable, as she'd decided the moment he had stood in that volcano and waited for his own bomb to freeze him to death.

This time it was different. She was simply angry with everyone in the room. How dare they have allowed him and Hayves, a communications lieutenant to go there alone? What were they thinking? Sending two barely armed officers quite literally into the eye of an artificial storm?

She prowled the main deck, suddenly desperate to be outside, with her lover. But she brought herself back to her seat and sat down. She had to be there to accept any attempts to communicate with the ship, after all.

Hayves felt sick with the heat. The humidity rose with each step she took towards the dully shining colony just half a mile ahead of her. Her hair clung to her skin. The storm above was so thick that it seemed like dusk, and the noise of it blocked out the sounds around her, making her jumpy.

She was certain she was feeling ghostly emotions coming in from all around her. Anger, misery, guilt. Hunger. Her skin crawled, and she hurried on, terrified that she was being followed.

Somewhere up ahead of her a pair of red dots glinted like cats eyes before vanishing. She swore she'd seen the same thing fifty paces being her.

Terror gripped her gut as she spotted another pair, and another, and she stopped for a second and retched with the heat and fear, emptying the lunch rations from her stomach. Tears she'd have liked to attribute to the vomiting rinsed her eyes and she scrambled forwards, her jellied limbs carrying her quickly and jerkily.  
She fumbled with her communicator as she ran, although it took several attempts to press the button.

"Ceti IV colony one, do you copy?" she begged it. There was no response and she sobbed aloud. Desperately she made a second attempt, and then changed the frequency. "Spock? Commander Spock! Please, copy me!"

He did not answer her, just as he had not for the entire morning. Where was his calm now, when she really needed it?  
She wheeled around. Pairs of red dots were all around her now, glinting, getting closer. She thought she heard footsteps, and another of those desperate cries in the distance.

She was not going to leave this retched planet, she realised. She grabbed blindly for her back pack and pulled out the rocket, before recording her final message and shooting it up through the storm.

Tears flowed down her face, as a man emerged from the dust to her left. His eyes glowed red and his face was set into a mask of pure rage.

"No!" She screamed, backing away, stumbling on the uneven ground. "Get away from me!" He heard her, but he did not listen.


	7. Space Jump

Uhura had become no less agitated over the course of the day. Scotty's accent grated against her as he explained some plan of lowering an electromagnet into the storm to attract the ions in it. It did not feel to her to be one of his most successful plans, and she was glad when he left.

She looked over at Kirk to find him looking back at her. He gave her a strained smile and stood stiffly, walking slowly to her console.

"Are you okay?" He asked.

"Fine." She lied, curtly. How the hell was she going to be fine?

"Don't lie to me." He replied, looking away from her at the main display screen, and then away again as the swirling clouds over the planet reminded him of the situation. "Look, he's never gotten into a situation we've not been able to get him out of, right? They've still got half a day to send a signal, they're probably fine."

But we're not there to get him out of it. She thought. Irritated she turned away, pressing unnecessary buttons and rechecking all frequencies as though it were necessary.

Suddenly her monitor buzzed at her. Incoming. It had to be Spock.

"Incoming message, Captain," she switched the broadcast from her ear piece to the bridge speakers.

"Junior grade lieutenant Hayves to Enterprise," Uhura cursed her colleague's voice, and then cursed the panic in it. Where was Spock? There was a lengthy pause, filled only by ragged breathing. "I, I-, that is, Commander Spock, I haven't seen him since last night, I'm being followed. I'm not gonna make it to the colony," there was a sob. Uhura sat, rigid with shock. "There's something down here. I don't know what's happened, it's not just a storm... Tell my family I love them."

"End Broadcast." Announced the console.

Kirk's throat felt like it contained a baseball. He stood like a fool looking at the computer in front of Uhura, not knowing what to do.

"McCoy," his voice shook. The doctor appeared next to him, fear evident on his face.

Forcing himself to remain calm, he gave the orders. "You and four security officers will join me in a shuttle. I want you to ready any acid proof suits we have and I want you to be down there with your med kit in ten minutes, sharp."

Uhura wheeled on him. "I'm coming with you." She stood up.

"No," he told her. "You'll stay here, you'll be in command of the Enterprise whilst I'm gone."

"I am not leaving him down there." She hissed at him.

"Well neither am I!" He resisted the urge to force her back to her seat. "You are staying on this ship Lieutenant, because I need someone up here who knows what they're doing, and I can't afford to lose the chief communications officer with Spock down there trying to communicate with us! You stay here, that's an order."

He turned to Bones for assurance, but the doctor was already gone.  
All eyes in the room were turned to him and Uhura. She said nothing, and so he took his cue to leave.

McCoy felt as though he was about to faint. The acid suit was warm in and of itself, and his sweat fogged the visor. He hated flying, and here he was, about to be catapulted through a cloud of volatile and poisonous acid and then allowed to fall for 14 kilometres, to land on a hostile planet. His parachute might fail, his acid suit might have a weakness somewhere, or simply be overwhelmed by the density and low pH of the acid in the air. He might have a heart attack and die.

Kirk punched his arm in a way that he was sure was intended to be comforting, but served as little more than acknowledgement of his fear.

"Are you sure this is safe?" He asked.  
Kirk gave him a quizzical look. "You're the doctor not me. I was hoping you'd be pretty sure of that yourself.

McCoy's stomach lurched as they stood to grab hold of the bars, and then again as the gravity of the ship changed so that his back was against the ceiling. As the door opened, and he saw Jim and the other officers being sucked out into the stratosphere, he almost forgot to let go.

Kirk's parachute retracted into its burned pouch. Despite his worry, falling through empty air like that was still exhilarating. He removed his helmet and looked about him. The sky was dark and the air choked with dust, visibility about 100 metres. 20 metres away, McCoy removed his own helmet, and bent double, spitting out a held in mouthful of sick.

He sighed and walked over to his friend, the security officers following him obediently. It was hot, and his limbs felt heavy with the greater gravity.

When he arrived it fell to him to decide how to split up the search party. Bones looked in bad shape, but still he was more valuable than the other officers. He should go to search out Spock further south, and Kirk should lead the other two officers to the colony to find out what was going on.

But he didn't feel like dividing it up that way.

He turned to the officers. "Lieutenant Arros," the Bajoran looked at him. "Lead these men to the colony. Set your phasers to stun, and find out what they hell is going on around here. Try and find Hayves if you can. Stay in contact as much as possible. I'm going back the planned camp for last night with Bones; we will try to find Spock and meet you up at the Colony ASAP. Got that?" He nodded.

"Come on," he said to McCoy, turning him round to face the south. "I trust you didn't shit yourself as well as throwing up?" He joked.

McCoy glared at him, wiping his mouth on a sleeve. "I'm fine," he said, pulling the sweltering acid suit off and dumping it on the ground. "Let's go."

Spock knew by now that he was delirious, and most definitely lost. He needed so desperately to be outside, to find Hayves, get back to the ship, and almost a full day of searching for a way out of the cave had left him exhausted and no nearer to finding the exit.

He stopped in a particularly well-slimed area to examine his arm. The wound had scabbed over, although it was still tender and clearly infected. He had no water to wash it with. The odd lump had travelled further up his arm, almost to his shoulder, leaving a trail of bruised blood vessels behind it.

It was highly illogical for him to be so delighted in its presence. Several times he had been certain that he was going to remove it, regardless of the pain, but each time he came to do it, a feeling of tenderness flooded him. It seemed fatter now, feeding off his nutrients.  
Other people should know about it. They'd want one too if they knew what it was like. He needed to show them so badly that his chest ached, and he scrabbled at the walls of the cave, tears running down his cheeks.

"Get me out of here!" he cried at the lifeless rock. "Please, get me out."


	8. The Search for Spock

Spock stroked the lump in his shoulder. A split second of pain gave way to pure bliss. In moments of lucidity, he was aware that he was being drugged by the creature, but those were now few and far between. The cave seemed unending, and every corner he had rounded teased him with the glow of evening light, which unfailingly emerged to be the odd slime clinging to the wall.

Now he sat, somewhat resigned, on the damp floor of the cave, although it was with conscious effort that he did not renew attempts to escape the caverns. Better to let the others find him. He knew they would be scared of the creature, but once they were infected, once they were blessed with it, they would understand.

It was fatter now, and stood out as purple against the green bruises that bloomed along its path.

This is ridiculous, he told himself. I'll not be driven to worship some parasite. But the creature continued to make its way upwards, toward his neck, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Kirk snatched McCoy's flask away, short tempered with the heat. "You know, for a doctor you sure as hell take care of your liver."

Bones looked at him with only mild concern before reaching out and taking it back. Jim was sure he took the extra swallow for his benefit. "Nonsense." He replied. "I'm just a little more realistic about the time span I'm gonna need it for than you seem to be. In twenty, thirty years I'll die on that ship, and I won't need a liver. Last thing I want is to go down without alcoholism as well."

"Yeah well, if you wanna drink yourself into oblivion, be my guest, but at least have the decency not to drink Spock into it as well." Jim responded. Spock had not answered any of his attempts to communicate with him so far, and the slow pace of the search under the rising heat made him worry even more. He tried his communicator a fourth time that morning, only to get the same reply.

"We're all worried about him Jim." McCoy said. He felt that there was much left that needed to be said afterwards, but he wasn't sure what it was or where to begin, so he didn't and they simply picked their way across the rugged landscape in silence.

Kirk allowed himself to become so involved with his own thoughts that when a noise sounded through his communicator he jumped, as though someone had just spoken in his ear.

"Lieutenant Arros to Captain Kirk do you copy?" The sound was crackly, no doubt due to interference from the storm.

"Copy Lieutenant," he said, looking at Bones as though he had been the source of his surprise.

"We've reached colony one. Not a person in sight! We've not seen anything that could've got Hayves or Spock, but it might be that they're staying away from such a large group. Found anything?"

"No. And remember, Spock might not have been "got" at all." He said, largely for his own benefit. "Head towards the second colony. Have you managed to get in contact?"

"Negative Captain. Will let you know the second anything turns up."

"Alright," he sighed. "Kirk out."

Bones was slightly ahead of him now, and the distance between them made Jim more conscious of the possibility of being attacked. He hurried to keep up in the choking warmth of the afternoon.

"Jim, look!" McCoy was pointing ahead. "This must be where they made camp last night."

Spock's tent was still there, roughed by the wind but with its electronic tent pegs keeping it in the ground. Kirk caught up and opened the covering flaps, bending to look inside. All of Spock's equipment was still within, his sleeping mat unrolled and apparently slept on, and his communicator lay at the furthest end, the ear piece twisted from the receiver as though pulled out at an angle.

He took a moment to banish the shake from his voice before turning to address McCoy. "It'll shock you to know that he isn't here. Doesn't look like there was much of a struggle, but I wouldn't rule one out. Maybe he went for a walk or something."

While Bones was relaying their discovery to Arros, Kirk simply sat in the entrance of the tent. He went through its contents – food rations, water, Spock's hand phaser, a spare uniform. Even his shoes were still inside. There was nothing sentimental, nothing to suggest it was Spock who'd been in there, except for his smell. He inhaled deeply as McCoy turned back to him.

"Are you alright? Are you crying?" McCoy said to his back.

"No I am not." He glared at his colleague, mostly to prove that his eyes were clear. "I was just.. Clearing my lungs."  
McCoy turned back to the landscape. "Sure."

They had continued on for another hour, when Bones noticed something that looked like a raindrop dashed on the rock beneath his feet. The rock was green where it was wet. He looked up for the origins as Jim bent to inspect the drop itself, but saw no rain clouds.

"Weird. From the reports they don't get hardly any surface water here, no rainfall in decades."

"It's not rain." Kirk looked up at him. He tried to smudge the edge of the droplet, but it had dried hard to the rock beneath it. "It's blood, Spock's blood."

Either side of them the drops continued, more frequent on their right until they began with a spatter, and to their left they became evenly spaced about a metre or so apart until they disappeared into a crag in the bedrock, smudged here and there by Spock's own bare feet.

They raced to it, expecting Spock to be trapped within it, but when they finally reached the entrance to the caves, he was nowhere in sight.

Forgetting to contact the other team, they each hastily lowered themselves into the hole in the planet and plunged into the darkness of the caves.

Inside it was cool, and so black that McCoy felt as though he were suspended in interstellar space. He clicked a torch out of his medical kit and examined the floor of the cave. A large patch, perhaps the equivalent of an entire unit of the Vulcan's blood had dried on the ground, with several handprints around it. He began to worry that his friend had died of the injury and been carried off by some large animal, but decided that the handprints were Spock getting up. His eyes began to adjust to the inky dark, and he saw a faint skin of luminosity covering the walls ahead.

"If it was night when Spock got here, then he probably wouldn't have realised he needed to go up to get out. I reckon even he'd have been out cold for a while," He said aloud. "If he was wounded badly enough then he probably hasn't even noticed the bruises from the fall."

The cave ran away in two directions, but single droplet of blood indicated that Spock had gone to the right, and the followed the path until it branched again. Unwilling to split up, they picked the right path a second time.

Spock was on his feet again. He passed through the same passages a second, third time, trying to make his way back to where he had started. His vision was shifting and the colours seemed a little odd, as though he was looking through rose tinted glasses. He was not entirely certain of his own movements, and fell repeatedly to his hands and knees as he went. He was sure he'd been here before.

Perpetually lost, he scratched again at the walls and punched the low ceiling of the chamber, grunting at the bruised knuckles it gave him in return. The sound echoed, and as it bounced back a second time, Spock let out a shriek of despair. He was never going to get out of here. Jim and Uhura and everyone else he cared about would never hear of his discovery. He would die alone in the ground. Uhura would mourn, and his captain would grieve briefly and then continue on without him, never knowing how much Spock cared for him. How much Spock would give to him if he had the chance.

Finally his legs gave out completely, and he knelt upright where he fell, waiting for death to claim him.

The only thing keeping Kirk going was the fact that they had yet to find a body. He stopped them at yet another intersection for a break. Three hours in the caves, and they had been back on themselves twice but were still finding new passages. Without a phaser to blast off the ceiling, Spock would die in here if he hadn't already.

Just as he felt tears beginning to burn his eyes, McCoy motioned to him. "Jim, there's some strange marks on these walls."

In one of the passages, the mould on the wall had been scratched away, as though someone were trying to escape through it. It seemed too illogical to be Spock, but then Jim had to remind himself that the half-Vulcan was wounded. Still, something about the animal nature of it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

They carried on down the tunnel, until he stopped McCoy by grabbing his shoulder. Up ahead a figure was slumped to its knees, motionless, eyes unfocussed.

Spock was barely conscious when his prayers were answered. He heard the footsteps before he saw them, but he knew that one pair was his captain. His captain. He heard his name gasped in horror as Kirk reached him, supporting him with his strong arms.

"Spock! Spock are you okay?"

He did not reply with words, only leant forwards slightly, and with his parched lips took his captain for his own.


	9. Parasite

"What the hell?!" Kirk jumped back, slapping Spock hard across the face before he could stop himself. The first officer's head snapped around and he lost his balance, crumpling to the floor in confusion. Kirk himself stepped backwards, feeling betrayed. "He fucking bit me!"

Spock was clearly out of his mind. His face was blank except for a shadow on one cheek, and tears ran down it onto the ground. He appeared to be mumbling something.

McCoy grabbed Jim by the arm, pushing him aside and taking out his scanner to pass it over the Vulcan, who convulsed slightly in pain as his shoulder hit the floor, before relaxing as though it were his own bed. His arm was wounded and infected, likely completely incapacitated. Bones was more concerned by the trail of green passing up his arm and over his shoulder, like a poisonous trail, and even more so by the pink glint the scanner illuminated when he shone its light into Spock's unfocussed eyes. "You just hit my patient now please stay back, Jim."

"He bit me." The human repeated blankly, torn somewhat between outrage and concern for his friend, and he had to admit, no small amount of guilt for the bruise beginning to appear on his cheek.

Bones ignored him. "There's something in his neck!" The scanner blinked unhappily and projected an image onto Spock's throat. Within his equivalent of the internal jugular vein was a parasite the size of a ten-year-old's thumb, its segments ringed by tiny undulating legs. Spock attempted to look up at him, but McCoy pushed his bruised face gently but firmly back down, exposing a small lump that indicated the presence of the parasite now lodged deep within his circulatory system. It had to act as a hollow tube, or else Spock would have lost oxygen to his brain by now.

McCoy turned away to his medical pack and withdrew a lancet, donning sterile gloves before unwrapping it. The noise roused Spock's attention again, who looked at him with terror when he turned caught sight of the blade.

"No!" He rasped, throat dry. "You don't understand! Do not take it out! It is a gift! Do not! Please!"

"A gift?" He asked, sceptically. "I'm not gonna perform surgery on you without anaesthetic, I'm just going to poke it with the blunt end." When this did not seem to comfort Spock, Leo straddled his chest, pinning his body and working arm to the floor, and signalled to Jim, who went to hold the commander's head down, stroking his friend's hair in an attempt to calm him.

He poked the lump with the blunt end of the scalpel as he had promised, and Spock writhed beneath him in agony, a cry rising from deep in his belly. The scanner readings showed that the pain was caused by hypersensitivity around the parasite, but that immediately afterwards there had been a huge injection of oxytocin and opiates into his bloodstream. No wonder Spock seemed to want to keep his "gift".

Deciding that the creature would not kill the patient if removed, he reached back for a sterilising swab and forceps, and taking a preloaded syringe of local anaesthetic. He could put Spock under, but was concerned that once he'd done so the Vulcan might not wake up. Fortunately Spock's lower blood pressure made it possible to open and repair a major vein such as this in the field, and if this had been Jim in the same position, he would not have dared remove it. He nodded at Jim. "It'll be easier on him if we do it now. It looks like he's becoming addicted to it. Keep him steady."

Kirk nodded back, tightening his grip on Spock's scalp.

When he felt the cool of the swab against his neck, Spock shrieked, twisting his working fingers into the back of McCoy's uniform, clawing him through it. He looked pleadingly at his captain, whose hands were kept well out of biting range, but held him as tenderly as possible whilst still immobilising his head. "No!" he sobbed. "Please, I can't live without it, Jim, don't let him take it out! You'd understand if you had it, just wait! Please."

But his captain said nothing, and Spock screamed as the needle for the anaesthetic pierced his skin.

McCoy's hands shook slightly as he cut through the skin and muscle protecting the inflamed blood vessel. Spock's protests had faded to weak sobs and pleas after the anaesthetic dulled the pain, although he still scraped at the skin of the doctor's back. Blood leaked out of the wound, coppery and green, as he pulled gently with his forceps on the intact jugular, trying to judge where the creature's head began. When he found it, he clamped above and below, and slit open the vein lengthways. As it split, a blue-purple segmented worm pulsed threateningly. It collapsed beneath the pressure of the forceps as he pulled it out, more blood leaking from within it than had come from the incision itself.

He placed the specimen in a jar, and hastily used the scanner's repair setting to seal the edges of the sliced vein together, careful to exclude any air, before removing the clamps to restore circulation to Spock's brain. He was pleased with himself; although his eyes had rolled back into his head, Spock's brain had starved of oxygen for less than 90 seconds. His friend would be fine.

He disinfected the wound again, and sealed it shut. His gloves felt wet with blood, and he slipped them off, discarding them carelessly.

After he had donned a clean pair of gloves to dress Jim's bitten neck, he injected Spock with a drug he hoped would stop any eggs hatching, and decided it would be wise to do the same to Jim. He had not found any parasite or eggs in his wound, but he wasn't willing to chance a surgery like that on a human.

Kirk sat with his back against McCoy's, exhausted. Spock slept with his head on Jim's stomach and shoulders in his lap, his face serene but tracked with dried tears in its layer of grime. Despite the situation, Jim enjoyed the closeness between the three of them, particularly with Spock. The Vulcan was rarely tolerant of any sort of physical affection, especially when it was not for the benefit of Uhura, but Kirk liked to think it reassured his friend on some level.

He tried to imagine what Spock would do were he in pain, and was reminded of the simple salute Spock had given him through the glass as he lay dying of radiation. Drowsy with medication, he rested his hand on Spock's chest, revelling secretly in the smoothness of the skin beneath the uniform as he spread his fingers.

Spock awoke slowly. He opened his eyes and did not know where he was. A knee dug into his back and as he tried to right himself from the painful position, he found a resistance on his chest. A hand he recognised pressed a Vulcan salute into the centre, a few inches from his heart. He lay back and let it rest there a moment longer, his head rising and falling as Jim breathed.

He took a quick stock of the situation: He was in the dark, a stone cell or a cave of some sort; his arm was injured and bandaged, clearly McCoy's work; from the sounds of the breathing behind him, he was alone with Jim and Bones - and he felt terrible.

Having established these facts, he collected himself and stood up with a start, frightened by the unexplained intimacy and needing to gain some distance between him and what he now recognised as a very human act of affection.

Without his Spock's weight against Jim, McCoy's weight forced the captain's face toward his own knees. He swore beneath his breath at the rude awakening and struggled to extricate himself from the awkward position. He looked about for the absent Spock, still feeling the memory of the pressure from his head against his belly, and found the commander standing as if to attention several metres away.

"Captain," he said evenly, belying the nausea that resulted from several doses of various medications.

"Spock," he groaned, blinking at him in the dark. "What business do you have looking so well after all this?"

Spock missed the good-natured intent of the question and set his face in its usual unreadable expression. "Business, sir?" He asked, confused by the question.

"What? –Never mind." Kirk shoved McCoy's arm out of his way and stood up, clumsily.

"Might I ask our location and how we got here, Captain? I seem to be suffering some sort of amnesia, or else I was taken from my bed."

Kirk blinked at his friend, debating where to begin.

"My most recent memory is of our departure from Earth." Spock prompted him.

Jim's heart sank a little. He did not remember the moment they shared in the engineering room. He sighed and explained the events between their arrival in orbit and coming across Spock in the cave.

"-And then you bit me." He said, sounding more resentful than he'd meant to.

"Bit you, sir?" Spock said, confused. "Please clarify?"

"You were crazy. We had to hold you down and cut out some parasite from your neck." He explained. He hesitated for a moment and then, to his own shame, revelled in revealing Spock's compromised state to the eternally composed Vulcan. "You were crying and screaming. You begged us not to take it out; you practically shredded McCoy's back trying to get him off of you."

Spock looked down, somewhat disturbed by the information. He was thankful that such a loss of reason had been witnessed only by the doctor and his captain, but he was still deeply embarrassed that it had taken place at all.

"I do apologise. I had not meant to harm you." He said, before the pause grew too long.

He had already done too human a thing today; he had told a lie. He remembered the entirety of their journey to the planet, and of his first day's trek heading north into the storm with a young lieutenant. But after awaking in such a position of intimacy with the captain he had faltered, and decided that he would acknowledge neither that particular sleeping arrangement, nor the previous close experiences they had shared. After his tears in front of Jim as he lay dying in the engine chamber, any show of sentimentality was too much to risk. He wanted desperately to meditate.

He reached up to stroke the small scar on his neck. It was tender, but did not hurt. Careful not to display any emotion, he sidestepped his captain and knelt next to the sleeping doctor. "Well, it seems we had best wake McCoy and get out of this place. The others will be concerned for our wellbeing."


	10. Regrettable Sobriety

McCoy had still been slightly tipsy when Spock's alien strength had hauled him to his feet with a bruising grip on his shoulder. The look he received as the Vulcan picked up the alcohol on his breath sobered him up, however.

"What, can't a guy have a drink in his down time, Spock?" He asked, knowing already what the response would be.

"Feel free, doctor, to spend the entirety of your.. "down time," as you call it, as inebriated as you wish. You are on duty, therefore it is against regulation that you consume anything—"

McCoy startled him out of his prepared speech with a phaser blast to the roof of the cave at its lowest point.

"Jesus Bones!" Kirk jumped.

"What are you doing?" Spock demanded, looking from Bones to the blasted rock to his commanding officer.

"Getting us out of here." He aimed another blast at the same spot, and was rewarded with the blinding light of the overcast day, filtering in through a small hole. He fired a third time and was pleased to find it created a hole the three of them could pass through. "Give that five minutes to cool down and we'll be out of here."

"You could have collapsed the cave on all of us." Spock could not let it go.

"Could have, but didn't. I don't know what your plan was to get us out of here, but I'll bet it was gonna take longer than mine, so just leave it."

"McCoy, this is not a democracy," Jim reminded him, although he didn't seem too bothered by his actions, beyond his initial surprise.

"To the relief of all involved." Spock interjected. Although his expression hardly changed, McCoy was well aware that irritation was the only emotion Spock was frequently willing to concede. "That course of action was highly illogical."

McCoy stood below the hole. Almost immediately there was a voice in his ear piece.

"Officer Rickson to Dr McCoy, you copy?"

"Copy that," he said. Spock opened his mouth to say something, but McCoy gestured at him to shut up.

"Doctor!" Rickson sounded elated. "We thought you were dead! It's been two days since your last contact." There was excited chatter in the background.

"Well, I'm not, just sober." He raised his eyebrow at Spock. "We've found Spock in a cave, and with that and the storm there was no way to get hold of you. Give us one minute and the captain can talk to you but for now we need to concentrate on getting out of here, McCoy out."

They made it back to where Spock's tent stood, now distorted and torn by the harsh winds, and decided it was as well to rest there than continue on, with Kirk still tired and McCoy repeatedly scanning Spock for any signs of ailment. The Enterprise it seemed had found a way of clearing some of the ions from the storm, and Kirk supposed that it was either Scotty or Chekov with their giant magnet. It was not sufficient to communicate with the ship, but it had cleared enough dust from the lower atmosphere that they had been able to communicate with the other search team, who had come to the base of the other colony, which was now turned refugee camp.

From just over 100 individuals, the small glass complex was now crammed with over 800 people, and the two doctors who were there had been struggling for days to control the epidemic with insufficient supplies.

Although the idea of zombies sprung to Kirk's mind, the real cause of the outbreak was the spawning of a non-native parasite inside the main water supply of Colony 1, causing all but a few hundred people who had not drunk any to become infected at the same time as the ion storm. Eggs had also being put within Colony 2's water supply, but had been discovered on time.

The good news was that, unlike zombies, none of the infected were dead. The bad news was that they tended to die of exposure after days of not drinking and searching the wasteland for more apparent beneficiaries of the pathogen.

With access to a hospital, all those who had not perished thus far would survive, but many would require brain surgery to remove the worm.

Despite his earlier comments about not being a democracy, Kirk deferred to Bones' expertise – or rather his paranoia- and they agreed to take shifts that evening to prevent any further disappearances. They set up the two remaining tents end to end and piled all of their remaining things into McCoy's tent.

"Come on, this tent was not meant to take one person and three people's stuff it was meant to take one guy!" He'd complained, but shut up when Jim told him his alternative was to share the space with him or Spock instead.

Leaving the doctor with orders to wake Spock in three hours, Kirk rolled out his matt next to Spock's and lay down next to him, shirtless in the heat. The Vulcan was already asleep, dressed in his spare uniform, which seemed like a first to Jim; Vulcans slept far less than humans did, and Spock was no exception to that rule.

He lay on his back next to the sleeping form, the brushing of their shoulders reminding him of that night on the Enterprise, when he had assisted in helping Spock fix his ear piece.

He sighed and closed his eyes, arranging himself so that his limbs stayed well within his half of the tent, and drifted off to sleep.

Several hours later, Spock had awoken to the sound of McCoy's snores. What an effective night watchman, He thought to himself, sitting up next to Jim.

The human next to him was sleeping deeply, his breathing heavy and slow. This was a situation Spock had wanted to avoid. Sometimes logic was best served by not thinking about a problem, particularly one such as this.

He felt hot and bothersome, and envied his captain for being the one to be topless. It would not do for both of them to be so.

He wondered what Jim thought of him. He must be so ashamed after my performance under the influence of the parasite. He knew on some level that this was not how Jim thought, but if he knew what his captain was not thinking, he had no concept of what the man did think of him. I have to find out…

What he had just thought of doing was unthinkable, illegal on many worlds. But, he convinced himself, it was the only logical course of action. It was his duty as First Officer to ensure he knew of the Captain's intentions, was it not? Still, what he was about to do was highly unethical, and he had no idea what Jim would do should he get caught. It might very well stand as mutiny.

The thought did nothing to stay his hand, however, as he reached up to rest his fingers gently on Jim's face and, careful to shield his own thoughts, lurched as an invisible spectator into his dream.

He watched for a moment that took an age, as a blue-green Orion girl stripped before him and pushed him back onto a bed in what appeared to be a messy dorm at the Academy. Before he knew what was happening, he looked down to find her unzipping his fly and pulling out his human erection.

This was the last straw for Spock, who panicked and jumped back.

Suddenly he was not looking at the girl, but at Jim's open eyes in the low light of their tent. With a pang of shame he realised that he had somehow ended up with an erection, not from the sight of the girl, but from the transference of his captain's own arousal during the meld. He hoped the black fabric of his regulation pants disguised it.

"What the hell were you doing Spock?" his captain growled at him, keeping his voice low to avoid waking McCoy.

Spock looked at him with a deliberately blank expression. His only logical escape was to lie, again. "I thought you were having a nightmare. You were mumbling in your sleep." He said.

Jim had the decency to blush, but he was still not convinced. "So you decided to… to look into my head?" He asked, accusingly. "Why didn't you just wake me up?!"

Spock seized the only way out he could. "It seemed the logical thing to do."

The human looked at him, knowing that it was anything but logical, but too tired to trust his own assessment. "Whatever. Look, Spock, just… Just don't do things like that. You of all people know about privacy."

"I regret the impact of my decision," he replied. He tried to guard his voice, but it just sounded cold. "I will not repeat this intrusion without your permission again." He lay back down, pretending to sleep, his back to Jim. Staring at the blank fabric of the tent, he could hear his pulse racing, concentrated on ridding himself of his "problem" by shaming it out of sight, no closer to answering any of the questions he had been trying to solve. If Jim wasn't disgusted with him before, he sure as hell would be now, he thought.

Jim sighed behind him and lay back down, still confused as to what the hell had happened.


	11. Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis

Spock was not one for wishing things, but if he had been, he would most certainly have wished that he had not attempted the mind meld with Kirk the night before. He had barely spoken to the human all morning, aside when logic necessitated it, and was certain that Kirk had ordered McCoy to perform a covert psychological evaluation as they travelled.

He heard the scanner behind him. Apparently covert was not the manner in which the doctor wished to evaluate him.

"I am fine, doctor," he insisted. "I do not believe I have suffered any long term damage."

"The hell you haven't," McCoy ignored his protests. "You're still too hot and your hormone levels are everywhere. I hope to god I left nothing in you."

"I am fine," he repeated. McCoy was about to mount a second protest, but a message over their communicators silenced him.

"Lieutenant Arros to Captain Kirk," the storm-distorted voice said.

"Copy, Lieutenant," Kirk responded.

"More information on the pathogen, sir. It appears to be a bioengineered helminth-like worm that has been designed specifically to take over the host's brain."

"Like the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis of your Earth," Spock interjected, his interest piqued. "It is a fungus the spores of which are inhaled by ants, causing them to climb as high as possible before the die, so that its spores may be released with a greater chance of infecting more ants." He explained.

"Something like that. Only far more complex- intelligently designed, if you will, to take control of a conscious brain by releasing hormones that increase both violent tendencies and loving ones, whilst convincing the host that the parasite is in fact somehow beneficial to them." The signal crackled. "The weakness is that one of the chemicals it releases reacts with the fluids in most species eyes, turning them red. This might be an unintended side effect or it might have been done intentionally to cause panic, or simply highlight who was infected. Any news from the Enterprise, sir?"

Kirk blinked up at the swirling dust high above them. "None yet, Lieutenant. It'll take them weeks to clear that much dust. Is that all?"

"That's all Captain. Arros out."

Spock turned to McCoy, blocking his captain from his own line of sight. "What a singularly fascinating organism. I should like to examine it later if I might."

"You might not," the doctor said resolutely. "You were addicted to the opiates that thing was releasing only 24 hours after you were infected. I don't trust you within a mile of it."

Sulu watched Uhura pace the bridge for the Nth time that day. The second attempt at removing the ions from the atmosphere had been a resounding failure; the electromagnetic interference was too much of a strain on the engines and they had been lucky to retrieve all the shuttles intact.

The storm had in fact grown, absorbing non-ionised particles into the air with it, dominating even more of the planet than it had done when Kirk had left.

"Why don't you take a break?" He offered. "The last rocket's message said that he was alive, even Hayves might not be dead out there."

"It's not good enough." She said quietly. "There's no way of us ever beaming any of them up. It'll take anyone at the centre of that storm two weeks to get out far enough, even if they left now. Anything could happen." She felt wretched. Alive was very much her bare minimum for Spock's wellbeing, and Lieutenant Arros had mentioned a disease which he had thought it appropriate to specify twice did not turn people into zombies. Junior medical staff had been rifling through everything from data banks to out-of-print medical texts from 16th century Orion, and found nothing even remotely like it contained within a single organism.

"Elewen days," Chekov piped, as though this achievement would spare her any heartache.

She groaned inwardly, certain that all crew were aware of how uncomfortable she was captaining the ship; as fifth in command, it was the first time she had even held the responsibility, but with Kirk, Spock and McCoy on the planet's surface and Scotty absorbed in finding some new solution to their pressing technical issues, the duty fell to her.

Exhausted, she rescinded her refusal to rest, handing command over to Sulu and retreating not to her own cabin, but to Kirk's ready room.

It was as messy as she'd come to expect from him, but the bed was made, and she lay down on top of the blanket. For some reason she could not shake the idea that some harm had come to Spock. Closing her eyes and using meditation techniques he had taught her calmed her, though, and she slept into an easy sleep.

Spock was in her bedroom at the academy. His black uniform looked becoming on him, and he regarded her carefully, deciding what he was going to do. It was not forbidden for graduates at the Academy to have carnal relations with students, provided the Academy itself was made aware, but this was not how he had imagined entering a relationship.

"Uhura," he began.

She cut him off. "Nyota, Spock."

"Nyota. I find myself in the difficult position of having to decide whether such an act as you propose would interfere with your education and my duties." She swore that he looked somewhat pained at being forced to talk about the relationship, something he avoided doing at all costs.

"Relax, Spock."

"It would be unwise for me to ignore the possibility of our relationship ending before the conclusion of your studies, and were that to compromise your ability to work effectively—"

She stopped him again, this time with her lips on his. He returned the kiss with a calculated motion, as though it was his first, although she knew otherwise. He tasted of toothpaste, like he often did, and smelled only of soap. The lips were soft, and his eyebrows sceptical, although she knew this was no reflection on his actual emotions.

"I would like for us to sleep together, Spock," she said plainly, knowing that for him such a question needed to be said in such a way that it could not be misinterpreted. "Would you like to have sex with me?"

He paused for a moment. It was a panic, she knew. If he hadn't wanted to, he would have declined promptly and left the room, only to deny it ever happening. No, it was his desire for it conflicting with his need to behave in the most logical manner that stayed him.

"I would like it," he said finally, and she knew there was a "but". "…but I fear it may not be beneficial to you in the long run."

She ignored the half-hearted warning, and pulled the stretchy hem of his uniform up over his head, discarding it by the bed. His chest was silken under her fingers.

He allowed her to push him down onto the bed, and sat patiently as she undressed, before turning and sliding his pants and underwear over his hips. They caught on his semi-erect penis, and he looked her in the eye as she tugged them down past it. She couldn't see the pleasure in his face, but somehow she could feel it where her fingers grazed his skin.

She jumped a little when she felt his hand against her breast, testing the weight of it. He had no technique, but her nipple hardened as he dragged his nails lightly over it.

His body shuddered as she ran her fingers gently from his Adam's apple and over one of his own nipples and down to his navel. She wondered if he was ticklish, and dismissed the thought as silly. She stroked lower, tracing a line from his hip, over the flawless skin, through his dark public hair and up the length of his hardening member, wiping the first drip of pre cum from the tip.

His kissed her, his tongue on her bottom lip. His hand made its way down to her own genitalia, and it transpired that he knew a little more about human biology, or at least about sex, than she had thought him capable of. His eyes were alert when she looked at him, watching for her response.

She kissed his neck, with hot, wet kisses as she mounted him. His lips parted, and he moaned when she gripped his cock and pushed him inside.

Uhura sat bolt upright in the bed, embarrassed that she had dreamt such a dream in a bed that was not her own.


	12. A Visitor

Kirk lay somewhat cautiously next to Spock, whose eyes were closed, but whose breathing suggested he was still awake. The heat of their two bodies in the small tent was almost unbearable, and it kept him awake, thinking of the Vulcan's strange behaviour the night before.

Spock placed a very high value on privacy, so it seemed all the more inappropriate that he'd actually attempted a mind meld without Jim's permission. For some reason he got the feeling that this was not a mystery he could solve with authority or McCoy's interference.

"Spock?" He asked the tent, anxious for a reply.

There was a pause so long he had begun to think the Vulcan really was asleep. "Yes?"

In a moment of rare social anxiety which he attributed to the lack of an audience and to the rubbing off of Spock's own lack of smoothness in interpersonal affairs, Kirk forgot what he was going to ask.

After a second lengthy pause, he settled on a simple question. "Are you okay?"

Spock turned his head towards him, although his eyes focused on a spot just above Kirk's face.

"I am." He said. They both knew the question had been more than an enquiry to his wellbeing. "I will not attempt to meld with you again, Captain, you have no need to worry."

"I'm not worried about you trying to meld with me. I'm worried about why you felt the need to."

Spock was silent, and Kirk braced himself for his friend to give him the cold shoulder.

"I was curious," Spock swallowed audibly, "as to your emotions regarding my… Earlier loss of constraint."

"Why didn't you just ask?" He asked, before he realised that it was a stupid question. Of course Spock wasn't going to ask him about his emotions, especially when the concerned Spock himself.

"I was not able." Came Spock's ambiguous answer.

They lay in the dark for a further moment, until Kirk turned up on his side and reached out a hand. He realised that for a second time he had no idea what he had intended to do; he had no specific gesture in mind, just a feeling that he ought to make some kind of gesture.

Spock took his hand from the air gently, and placed it on the place where they mats met between them. His hand lingered on top of Kirk's before he retracted it again, tucking it to his chest.

"I'm not angry with you," he reassured him. "I know it wasn't you who bit me. It was just some parasite, Spock. Anyone would have done the same. It wasn't a weakness."

Spock rolled onto his back again, laying his arms carefully by his arms.

"I know." Touching Jim's hand had told him so.

McCoy awoke with a fright to the sound of a phaser blast being followed by the sound of someone keeling over. He fought his way out of his tent, gun in hand, to see Jim holding his own phaser in one hand and keeping back Spock with the other. A little girl of about seven lay face down on the ground, and Spock was clawing at Kirk to be able to get to her.

"What the fuck?" he swore, pushing both Jim and Spock out of his path as he reached the girl, flipping her onto her back. Her eyes were open, stunned, and glowed with a dull red light. In her mouth was a ripped strip of Jim's tent.

"No! Let me see her!" Spock shouted. The desperation in his voice surprised Bones enough to look round in time to observe it on his face, before Jim stunned him as well and lowered his limp body so that all but his feet were inside the tent.

They were silent for a moment whilst McCoy worked, trying to find the parasite on her body. She had no bite marks, so must have been infected by the contaminated water supply. The parasite was in her brain, and there was little he could do unless he wanted to risk giving her brain surgery outside of a hospital, with no general anaesthetic beyond their phasers, and a total of two units of human blood on his person, more if he could find that either he or Jim were a match.

"There's nothing I can do, Jim. She needs a hospital." He said.

"We're only half a day away from Colony 2," Jim mused. "We can take her there when we go in the morning."

Bones shook his head. "Spock won't be able to cope with it. He's as addicted to this parasite now as he was before I took it out. We can't carry them both, so we'll have to keep both of them tied up and wait for guards to come from the Colony to us to help."

"I doubt a knot will hold Spock, but I suppose that's our only option." Kirk pressed a button on his ear piece. "Kirk to Lieutenant Arros, copy? Good, I need at least two armed officers sent to my coordinates immediately. We have an extra casualty on our hands, and Spock's not doing so well either. Be here by morning. Kirk out."

When he was done the Captain turned an accusing eye on him as he pulled a rope from his pack and sliced it in half. "Did you actually think I'd killed some little kid?"

"No!" To the captain's credit, Bones had not. "You might be an asshole but you're not a fucking child killer."

"Good," Kirk eyed him suspiciously as he backed into the tent, rope in hand, to take care of Spock.

"And I suppose you get to tie up our friend whilst I'm left with a rabid child. I'm not sleeping next to her you know!" McCoy took his own rope and, without cutting it, simply wound it round the little body as if he was making a poor attempt at mummification, and tied off the ends. He looked longingly at the tent, before shoving her roughly into it and yanking his blanket out from under her to sleep on the hard floor between the two tents. "Fucking asswipe." He mumbled, downing a mouthful from his worryingly light flask and lying down on the ground.

Spock awoke for the second time in two days to find Kirk asleep beside him, only this time, he found his arms and legs bound.

With a pang of shame he remembered the events of what must now be half an hour ago; awaking to the sound of ripping fabric and staring into a red glint through the hole in the tent.

A need had overtaken his body and his mind that he could not control; he had to get to those eyes, to be bitten, to get to the bliss he had felt with the parasite. It was illogical, and he knew it, but before he could think he had rushed out to the girl, felt her filthy hands grab his shoulder, felt her lunge for his tenderly exposed throat.

And then she had fallen to the ground like a rag doll, and Jim had hauled him out of the way, stopping him from getting to her.

Testing the bonds proved that he was unlikely to be able to escape from them without waking Jim, and made reaching the girl near impossible. He berated himself for even considering trying to reinfect himself in his now calmer state, feeling strongly that logic should exempt him from addiction. Of course, he knew it only exempted him from the risky behaviours that led to them, but surely, he would be able to resist now? He knew why McCoy had refused to let him look at the specimen taken from his own person.

Given a life of stern logic and little emotion, this proved to be the most miserable night's sleep Spock had ever had.


	13. The Best Thing for Enna

McCoy awoke at dawn to the sound of screaming. His heart in his throat as he opened his eyes, he looked toward the source only to discover it coming from his own tent. He unzipped the front flap only to find that the girl they had intercepted the night before was struggling against the bonds, kicking her feet so hard that his rather poor attempt at a knot was beginning to come loose.

"What the hell- is she alright?" Kirk's voice said behind him. The noise was beginning to hurt McCoy's ears, and when he grabbed her leg to pull her to him in order to retie the rope, her voice broke gratingly.

"I'm not sure." He tied the rope back up, and she stopped screaming as suddenly as she'd started. It turned out to be the least of their problems, because when he glanced back at Jim he did so just in time to see Spock, arms still tied in front of him, emerge from their tent. He caught the Vulcan as he hurled himself at the child.  
"Spock, stop, you'll crush her!" He pulled his desperate friend back by his hair.

Spock's face was emotionless and his voice steady, although he still lunged for the inside of the tent. "Restrain me."

"Already on it." Kirk had bound his legs as his upper body was stuck within McCoy's tent, immobilised by the hand gripping his hair and another yanking his arms away from the girl.

Between them they dragged Spock back to his mat and McCoy sat on his legs, even though his struggling had ceased.

"She screamed because she knew I had been infected," Spock said certainly from underneath him. "She was calling for me to come and reinfect myself."

McCoy released him and crawled back out to where the girl lay motionless. His scanner told him her body was pumped with dangerously high levels of opiates, and he rushed for a syringe of adrenalin. It shocked him, then, that when he lent over her to stab it into her heart, she looked back at him.

Her brown face was grazed down one side, fleck of blood hanging on it in the same shade as her eyes. Her hair was in two bunches on either side of her head, one clean and frizzy and the other matted with what he hoped was her own blood. She looked at him with them, and he couldn't tell if it was the virus, but he thought that she looked kind, and somehow wise. "You'll be sorry you made yourself wait for this." She said, her voice hoarse from the screams. The hysteria she'd been taken by just moments before had evaporated. "I know you think I'm silly and crazy, but I'm not." She assured him. "I'm very clever, and you'll know it when they get you."

He sat there stunned, needle in hand. "And why is that?"

"Because it's the best thing." She said with her previous certainty. "Come here," she urged him. There was a tiny piece of something red caught between her teeth.

"I don't think that's a good idea." He made sure he was out of range.

"Neither did Enna but she thanked me afterwards."

It made McCoy shudder to know that the small child in front of him had bitten another person until they bled in order to infect her with a dangerous pathogen. She sounded so intelligent and so sure of herself. He wondered if it was Enna stuck in her teeth and then decided that he didn't want to know any more about her.

"Yeah, well I'm gonna say thanks, but no thanks." He carefully returned the syringe to his kit.

"My name is Cam." She told him, craning her neck to face him. He felt at once desperate to ignore her and guilty for doing so.

"Call me Bones." He told her, relenting.

"When you change your mind I will bite you." She said, and lay her head back down.

Odd, he thought to himself as he heard the sound of a car pulling up nearby; She must be less than a quarter of Spock's age, but she's four times more persuasive.

Spock was grateful to be in a separate car to the child, although only on a purely logical level. It had been so long since he'd been in a land vehicle, that he had somehow managed to forget they existed. The air conditioning hit him like a plunge into icy water, but Jim seemed relieved.

Breakfast was offered and declined; the smell of the greasy Earth food Jim was eating was making his stomach nauseous and his head pound.

He dragged his eyes away from the dust storm outside, if only to take his mind from the glinting pairs of eyes they were passing at lessening intervals. "May I request a drink?"

Jim and Lieutenant Arros looked at him strangely, and Spock realised that he had interrupted their conversation. Kirk passed him a bottle that he had clearly drunk from.

Spock fixed him with his best blank stare until a fresh one was offered. Vulcans did not share drinking vessels, and despite being beyond caring, he could not afford two lapses in one request for a drink. A joke was made at his expense, which he did not understand. This, at least, was normal.

"Come on Spock," Jim slapped his arm playfully.

"Do not touch me," he said as firmly as he could, jerking his arm out of reach. Jim laughed but backed away in his seat slightly, not wanting to call him out on his uncharacteristic behaviours in front of Arros and the scientist from Colony 2 who sat in the passenger seat beside him.

The agitation he was feeling did not seem entirely to be a product of his unintended foray into the realm of addiction. He was unable to halt a mounting anxiety, which was beginning to flutter about in his stomach. Anxiety was an illogical emotion; it had no influence on a positive or negative outcome, and therefor was redundant.

This thought did not comfort him as he realised he was unable to control the gnawing sensation that something bad was going to happen. Hormones and adrenaline surged through his blood stream. He felt hot and bothersome. He should have been able to control this. Unless...

No: He was 29; almost thirty. It was almost unheard of for a Vulcan to finish puberty so late. He knew of one man who had entered into his first Pon Farr at the age of 26, but most of the people whose ceremonies he had attended had been aged somewhere between 17 and 24. He suddenly felt cheated that not only could his human heritage have failed to spare him the trauma of what he believe to be about to happen, but that it had made him late, unable to look to his peer group for help, although he doubted they would have been willing to aid an outsider like himself in such a delicate matter.

His home planet was gone and his betrothed with it. Uhura was 480 kilometres above him. He closed his eyes and attempted to meditate on the issue, allowing himself to go back to the safety of his many levels of mental discipline and the security of a lifetime of rationalising problems, but try as he might, he realised that the impending event was not a logical one. The rumbling of a real engine settled him into a rhythm he could no longer achieve on his own.

When someone opened the car door from the outside to let him out, he forced himself not to snap at them for the interruption, instead compelling his limbs to work against their own better judgement and stepping out of the car in front of the surprisingly large complex before him: They were inside the ring of a large electrified fence, which had hastily been topped with barbed wire. The building before him rose up like a glass cliff from the rock, six stories high and 150 metres long. The red-black eye of the cloud reflected in it, looking into him like the eyes of the child in McCoy's tent.

"I think," he said quietly to Jim, "that I might like to retire somewhere to rest."

They sat in a cramped office adjoining the main research laboratory on the second floor. Colony 2 was a tiny science colony of one building which house staff and laboraties, which had been set up to establish the most effective complete ecosystems for terraforming. A similarly tiny old man who Jim believed had to be half Orion and half human sat behind the desk, almost buried by a lifetime of papers.

"…And so we've been keeping the infected in the main warehouse under lock down. They're still as intelligent as they were before they became ill, it's a job to keep them there I tell you. My wife has taken charge of the security around there, but we only have ten security on staff! And you can't trust anyone who we've successfully treated with the infected or in the lab- they just reinfect themselves! We've really no supplies left to treat the addiction." Said the man, whose name Kirk could not pronounce. Doctor Axjerbl's hands shook as he beckoned a similarly old human woman into the room. "This is my wife, also Doctor Axjerbl."

"Call me Christa," she said. Her back was bent at an even greater angle than her husband's, but she declined the seat Bones offered. "We are most in need of some sort of anti-inflammatory," she rustled through a crate of unspecified medicines and procured a preloaded syringe. She looked exhausted, and Kirk did not take offense when she turned on her heal and left again without a word.

"Forgive her," Axjerbl said. "She has been working all night. We've the added problem you see, of containing those who have already been treated. It's near impossible to keep them here without keeping them in our animal exercise yard. Some of them have even been willing to attempt to climb the electric fence to escape." He indicated a window. Glancing behind him Kirk and McCoy both looked outside; within the perimeter fence was a large enclosure, heaving with people looking like refugees.

"How many are in there?" Kirk asked, appalled. He respected the need for them to be detained, but to say the facility was inappropriate was more than an understatement.

"At present? Three hundred and fifty three. Soon to be three hundred and fifty four, with the one you brought in."

For a second Jim had no idea who the man was talking about.

"You're going to put Spock in a cage with a bunch of parasite addicts?" Bones said, his voice nearing disgust.

"Where else would we put him? If he is not contained he will certainly attempt to expose himself to the parasite." The tiny man attempted to appear in control.

Jim stood up. In truth, he was worried about Spock and his unusual behaviour. "Look, I would rather tie myself to him than put him in there. He's too... Proud, to be herded like some farm animal. He's a member of my crew, I need him with me."

Axjerbl shook his head. "It has to be done. He is being scanned and searched now, and once we have established that he is healthy and carrying no... Illicit materials, he will join the others."

"If you put him in there you're gonna end up with zero people in that cage." McCoy raised his voice. " Dr Ax-j… -Look, he's not a miner or a researcher, he's our Chief Science Officer, and our First Officer. You put him in that enclosure and he will find a way to get out of it."

"I'm sorry Doctor, but you have no jurisdiction here." Axjerbl looked threateningly at Jim, as though to warn him that his own jurisdiction also ended when he left the ship.

Spock was not in the bedroom it had been implied the scientist was leading him to. Instead he was in a room with a tiled floor and walls, that looked suspiciously as though it was a recently appropriated mortuary.

"What is this?" He asked the woman who had been in the car with them.

"You are to be screened for pathogens before joining the others in the enclosure." She said. "Please remove your clothing."

Spock stiffened. This was all he needed. "Explain." He demanded.

"All those who have previously been infected are contained in the enclosure." She said, offering no further information.

"What enclosure?" He asked. She ignored him.

"Sir, I am going to ask you please to remove your clothes. If you would prefer to be screened by a male this can be arranged."

"No," He told her.

"Good. Please place your clothes in this container for decontamination." She held out a plastic tub. Her chirping voice and equally bouncy brown hair annoyed him, although he knew it to be an illogical response to the way a woman he had just met chose to get her hair cut.

"No I will not remove my clothing." He clarified. Indignation coursed through his veins like never before.

She opened her mouth to order him to do so, and before he knew it his hand was on her neck and he was lowering her to the floor, dropping her about two feet above it and not feeling a shred of guilt for the crack that told him she would likely have a head injury.

He locked the door behind him, back out in the courtyard. Freedom was there, in plain sight. There were two guards on the gate they had driven in through, both of whom he could easily circumnavigate should he wish. Beyond the fence he could not see the red eyes staring at him, begging him to join them, but he knew they were there. He could have that bliss again. Have the one thing he so desperately needed.


	14. Doctor and Doctor Axjerbl

Spock slid round the back of the guard post. He had somehow managed to remain unseen. His own equivalent of adrenaline surged powerfully in his blood stream, making his limbs shake and his heart beat so hard he could feel it in his side. He could see the guard nearest him patrolling outside the guard station, an androgynous person in their thirties. It was clearly not a military compound; both guards carried phasers but wore only their normal work clothes, lab coats draped over the chair in the small structure.

As the human came closer to him, he reached his hand round the corner of the plaster wall and grabbed them by the neck, pinching so hard he almost broke the skin. Something almost uncontrollable and completely illogical within him would have done anything to fuck that person right now, in whatever orifice was available. As they were out for the count, he simply let them drop to the ground against the building, if it could be called such a thing. Taking up the unconscious guard's phaser, he approached the door from the other side. The man within look directly at him, and Spock realised he would have to abandon the stealth approach.

"Excuse me sir, I wouldn't go out there if I were—"

He stunned the man with the borrowed phaser before he could even realise what was going on.

For a second Spock stood there, realising that after days of constant supervision and restraint he was finally free. He looked out into the dust storm, and there he saw them – a pair of eyes, glistening with desire. Kind eyes, in a sense. Eyes even a Vulcan could not resist.

Lieutenant Hayves stood less than 30 metres from the entrance to Colony 2. She stared at the figure standing outside the guard station, and the figure stared back. His unshielded emotions drowned her in intensity; anger; fear; lust. He wanted her to bite him and then he wanted to fuck her like his life depended on it; in fact, it almost seemed as though his life did depend on such a thing.

He walked steadily towards her, and as he did so his feelings became clearer. It wasn't her he really wanted. She could feel how desperate he was to see Uhura. He was from the Enterprise, then. And she could feel something repressed, buried so deep that even in his current state she could not feel it at such a range. A more secret lust; a more shameful breed of love. It was not until his hands reached out and touched her bitten throat that she was able to identify the object of that love, or indeed who it was who was feeling these things. She salivated heavily, looking at his imploring features. Spock is in love with the Captain. She thought. And that was the last thing she remembered.

Jim was almost resigned to the idea that Spock would be kept with the others in the cage, when the door was banged open unceremoniously and the Vulcan walked in, his face steely and a little paler than usual.  
"Spock!" He jumped from his seat and compelled his friend into it.

Axjerbl was at a loss for words.

"Do not," Spock breathed heavily between words. His struggle for control was obvious, "Force me to decide between you and that pathogen again."

"I won't." Kirk said sternly, fixing Axjerbl with a glare, taunting him for his lack of faith.

He put a hand on Spock's shoulder. The heat of his skin radiated through the fabric of his uniform, unbearably hot against the climate controlled room. "As there are no native life forms on this planet and the parasite has clearly been bioengineered, I'm declaring this a military situation."

"A military situation? No one has even claimed responsibility for the release of the parasite! This is a scientific problem with a scientific solution!" Axjerbl stood also, although his head came only to the height of Kirk's nose.

"Not one that you seem to be managing." Kirk said stubbornly, gesturing to the world outside the office. "You're operating on kids without anaesthetic. You're keeping people in cages outside with no shelter immediately after that surgery. This is a military operation now."

"Then I shall head it as such!" Axjerbl shouted.

He pointed a finger at the doctor. "Do you hold a military position, sir?"

There was a silence in which a scream could be heard from outside, within the caged enclosure. Dr Axjerbl had never served in the military or any branch of Starfleet. They all knew that there was no one on the colony above the rant of Lieutenant – no one aside from his self and Spock.

"I believe," Spock said, having calmed himself down, "That one of your scientists is locked in your… Examining room, quite unconscious. Your front entrance may also be compromised."

The belated threat from his normally disciplined colleague made Kirk immediately on edge, and he gripped the shoulder tighter, catching McCoy's gaze as Dr Axjerbl called for someone to investigate.

When the silence persisted for too long, McCoy stood up. "Is there a room for us?"

Before Axjerbl could respond, Arros moved to aid Jim in standing Spock up. "Me and the others have a dormitory down the corridor, I will take you there."

They left the doctor sitting in his seat, suddenly aware that whatever power he had held prior to the arrival of the young captain was long gone by now.

Spock sighed deeply as Jim and Bones pushed him onto the lower bunk of a bed. He could tell the outlet of breathe worried them. He could not recall sighing in front of them before. McCoy's scanner was bleeping before he could even speak. He half wanted to protest Jim's presence for the exam, but he knew it was illogical to do so as Dr McCoy would doubtlessly tell him what he found as soon as they left the room.

"His hormone levels are ridiculous," he said as though Spock were not present. "What you would call his adrenaline, it's dangerously high. His sex hormones are more than three times their usual count. Dammit Jim, his temperature's literally rising as I watch it. 35.43; 35.44... If this carries on he'll die!"

"Has he been bitten?" The captain asked.

"No. He's all clear for physical injuries. All clear for pretty much everything, in fact. There's no cause I can find for the hormones or the fever."

He reached out to touch his forehead and Spock retracted instinctively. "Don't touch me." The words came out in a growl. "There's nothing you can do." He said, as patiently as he could manage whilst still glaring at the hand, which threatened to loom back over his face.

"What do you mean? You know what this is?" Jim asked. "There must be something."

"There are anti-adrenaline drugs I can give you; and hormone blockers." McCoy provided.

Their interference annoyed him and he attempted to compose himself. "They will do nothing for me."

"Spock, are you on heat?" Bones asked, as tactical as ever. It was meant as a joke, light relief, but Spock did not detect this.

Instead he lay rigid on the bed and fought for control before he spoke. "No…" It was technically true. Evolutionarily speaking, nothing native to Vulcan went "on heat". The reproductive cycle of many animals had a similar mechanism, but it was defined differently in most science text books. He opened his mouth to say more and then realised what he was doing and shut it. His head felt so hot he could barely see the two men by his bed.

It was too late, Jim had seen. "What were you about to say, Spock?"

"I think I would not like to say it after all, sir." He said.

Jim shook his head. "Spock, this is important, you could be dying here!"

"Please," he begged, grateful it did not reach his eyes or voice. "Respect my privacy in this matter."

"Don't make me order you to tell me Spock." His captain said softly. Spock felt sick.

"We do not speak of it to outsiders. Indeed, we do not speak of it among ourselves."

"Who is "we" and what is it we don't speak of?" Kirk was impatient. His face swam a little as he leaned over Spock in an attempt to look him in the eye. Spock fixed his gaze on the bottom of the bunk above. "Are "we" the Vulcans? Answer me dammit."

"Yes." Spock answered, hoping it would be sufficient, but knowing that this was unlikely.

"I spent a fucking year studying alien biologies on top of my medical degree when I was at the Academy," McCoy said indignantly. "Why did no one say anything about this?"

"It is not spoken of." Spock repeated.

"Well I'm afraid you're gonna have to break your vow of silence, because I wanna know." McCoy demanded. "Are you on heat or aren't you? What is it you need to break out of this thing? For God's sake you're not gonna last another three days in this state!"

Only three days left? It was less than Spock had hoped. Perhaps his half human body had less of a tolerance for such things than the average Vulcan. "Of a sort." His voice sounded quiet. Weak. "I will say no more on the matter."

"Spock, this won't leave this room but you have to tell us." Kirk ordered, although there was an anxious note to his voice. "Whatever it is, it can't be so embarrassing that we won't still try to help you. You're my First Officer and I can't afford to let you die because you won't tell us what's wrong." When Spock did not respond for a moment, he added. "And we're your friends."

Not for much longer, Spock thought. If he did not die of the indignity as a profoundly irrational part of him believed he would, he would die of the fever.

His voice sounded dry and resigned as he spoke. "I am entering the Plak Tow, the blood fever. It is the culmination of our sexual cycle. Every seven years we experience the Pon Farr. It is most undignified. It drives us to mate, or we die of the fever." To soothe the scientist within him, he added, "It is much like the sexual cycle of the female ferret on your Earth; each year they must mate and if they do not, their hormones build up and kill them." He regretted his addenda. It made him seem even less like the logical, advanced being he was for the other 2,551 days of the cycle.

When no one else responded, he pushed himself up to look at them, doing his best not to seem as though he was literally dying of primitive sexuality. Their wide eyes and gaping mouths told him he was failing.

"If you knew about this, why didn't you say something?" Kirk asked. "I'd've had you off duty for a month if I had to. We could have taken you to the Vulcan colony, anything you needed."

"I did not know. I believed that due to my human half this would never befall me."

"Wait," McCoy said. "How old are you? And your balls are only just dropping?"

"I am twenty-nine and my testes descended a long time ago." The man was irritating him. Actually, everything was irritating him. His breath caught in his throat, taken away by a glut of words and theories he needed to expel. "I believe this has been triggered by exposure to the hormones secreted by the parasite. Plak Tow is characterised by very high levels of hormones analogous to—"

"Calm down Spock," Jim told him.

"-your adrenaline. The parasite must have been releasing it to counter-effect the opiates it also secreted, or else human hosts would die off quickly." He continued, exhausting himself.

"Spock, it's alright. All we have to do is find someone for you to have sex with and you'll be fine, right?" McCoy said. "Uhura will understand."

Mentioning both another partner and Uhura in the same breath was a mistake Spock struggled to forgive. "Do not imagine that the Pon Farr is anything like the lusts you humans harbour." He struggled to make sense and looked away from the pair of them. "When I take a partner to ease the fever, I will bond with them for life. Their mind will meld permanently to mine, it is a telepathic link which is near impossible to break. Now, unless either of you can procure Lieutenant Uhura within the next three days, please leave me alone. I am tired."

They both looked sadly at him. He closed his eyes against it and kept them closed as he heard them retreat towards the door.

"Can we bring you anything?" It was Jim's voice.

"Just peace and quiet so I can meditate." He replied, tersely, and regretted it immediately. Kirk was going to remember his last few days of life as a bitter, undisciplined fool.

And Uhura would not remember them at all.

He gave a single dry sob after they had left the room.


	15. A Fair Trade

Kirk kicked the broken rocket where it sat at McCoy's feet and the resulting explosion burned a hole in the leg of McCoy's uniform pants and another in the perimeter fence as the communication device ripped through the metal wire and out of the main compound as though it sought the same freedom Spock had that morning.

"Whoa!" Bones jumped back. "Stop it Jim, if you destroy everything in this fucking colony it's still not going to fix Spock!"

Hayves, miraculously, had been found, unconscious from a Vulcan neck-pinch just ten paces from the entrance to the compound. Bitterly, and with as much guilt, Kirk decided he would trade her for his First Officer in an instant. He had considered every option. The rocket was going to do nothing, even less now; the terrain would become impossible to navigate by car only a few miles beyond their camp from last night and it was a 3.5 day walk from there to a place where both the communicators and transporter would –hopefully- work, and that was if Spock was fully mobile, which he decidedly wasn't. Spock refused the idea of bonding with any of the several women who had offered their services, including a young officer on their own party, who Kirk would soon be recommending for promotion. Unless a miracle could be worked from Uhura's end, Spock was actually going to die of blue balls.

He felt responsible, he realised, for having ordered the Chief Communications Officer to stay behind on the Enterprise- half her inferiors could have taken over her position for the time they'd been down there – everyone on both colonies spoke Standard and xenolinguistics was not a skill needed to fix communications during a storm. It was his fault, simply because he had wanted to be the one to save Spock. What made him so special? Nothing. And he was worse than a simple failure. He had put his friendship before the actual friend.

"I could order him to sleep with Officer Abitos." He said, desperately.

"You can't order people to fuck Jim, and if you could it'd be rape by anyone's standards." McCoy's words shamed him and he paused for a second.  
"He's going to die." His voice sounded distant.

"It'll be alright," McCoy attempted to console him. He shrugged Bones' hand from his shoulder. Neither of them believed his words.

Bones stood in the warehouse, outside the massive floor to ceiling cage, which currently contained more than 900 diseased people, snarling, hissing, calling, seducing him all at once. He walked around the side until he saw the figure of the Lieutenant he recognised. She sat in a corner, head on her knees with her eyes closed, motionless. Her hair was lank and her skin had lost its lustre, she seemed otherwise unharmed except for the bite which infected her, standing out red but bloodless on her neck.

"Hayves." He said, too quietly, he believed, for her to have heard.

Her head snapped up at him, eyes blazing, and she threw herself at the mesh of the cage before others could take up the space.

For a moment he thought she was delirious. Her head moved to rest on the mesh as though it was too heavy for her to hold up. It took her a moment to find a position from which the layer of sweat beading on her brow did not cause her to slip. Her eyes were unfocused, although she was looking at his face.

"You are worried about Spock." She said, unsolicited. He stumbled backwards, not prepared for her to be so lucid. Why was Spock delusional when he was infected? Was he already in the Pon Farr when we found him? Or does it do this to all Vulcans? He wondered. He guarded himself from answering her question, fully expecting to be manipulated.

"Yes," he said at last.

"I don't know what it is that ails him," her lips brushed against the metal as she spoke, "But I do know what the cure is."

"He doesn't want any of the women here," he said, aware he'd made it sound as though they were a commodity. "There's a mental bond that forms when he… Does his thing. He doesn't want it with just anyone."

She smiled at him knowingly, and he had the distinct sensation that he was about to be manipulated into doing something. She worked her wrist through a gap in the fence.

"Come here," She reached out to him.

He leaned forwards, knowing he was about to do something utterly stupid. Her hand was clammy where it gripped the skin of his cheek.

"It doesn't have to be a woman…" She whispered, breath hot against his chin. She moved as if to kiss his throat, and bit it with such force that it made a wet, crunching noise. He felt nothing. He should have about an hour before the larva began producing the addictive chemicals that would take over his mind.

"And you think he'll shag a guy who's down here instead?" he shouted through his now burning throat, angry that he'd allowed himself to risk his own neck, very literally, for such useless information. Those infected who had yet to notice his presence heard and he saw a hundred bodies slam into the metal between the rails, fingers and hands and wrists forcing their way through, reaching for him as she had only moments before. Her body blocked their path.

"I know it," she hissed, her eyes rolling into her head, the blood foaming in her mouth. His blood, he noted. Her mission complete, she pulled her arm back and crumpled to the floor of the enclosure, unconscious before she even hit the floor. He staggered backwards as fingers caught against his shirt. It was hot and wet. The skin beneath his Adam's apple felt like it had been pressed against hot coals.

An alarm sounded and two scientists rushed over, pinning him to the floor with his neck extended. His heart beat so hard and so fast that he could feel the blood leaking from his neck leaving in spurts. The pressure of it against the wall of his chest seemed as though it would smash through his sternum. Fingers pressed hard into his shoulders and head, bruising him and breaking capillaries, but he was in too much pain to understand what was happening.

He braced himself against the pain as someone reached forceps into the torn flesh. He could feel them miss several times, pulling accidentally on shredded bits of skin or muscle. He screamed and there was vomit in his throat. The forceps were cold against the hot agony of the wound. He felt them plunge deeper, press against the exterior wall of his windpipe. He choked, and then something warm and slippery was being eased out; long and thin, it clung to the inside of the blood vessel it was embedded in, and its body stretched as it was pulled on.

The parasite curled in the forceps as they drifted out of focus, and he passed out on the linoleum floor.

The shit he did in the name of friendship, he thought as the world faded to black. If Spock survived this Pon Farr crap he fucking owed him one.


	16. Desperate Times

The Mrs Dr Axjerbl turned out to be far more understanding than her husband, as she dosed Bones with codeine and paracetamol and handed him a damp cloth to wipe his tear stains away. "I hope that was worth it young man. I've seen a disappointing kiss in my time, but that one was something else."

He attempted to say something to the effect that it had been an exchange for information, but achieved only a gurgle, the vibrations of which forced him to lie back down on the examining table.

"I'd give it a day or two dear," she told him. "You've had my assistant pocking your larynx with a piece of metal whilst you screamed your head off. Honestly, why they didn't bring you in here, I could've at least had you properly cleaned up. Operating on the floor, 30 feet from an examining room! Can you believe such a thing, doctor?"

McCoy did not believe it and nor did he have a day or two. Whatever state Hayves had been in, she had not been malicious. She would not have said what she had if she didn't genuinely believe there was someone who could save Spock. He just hoped to god that the one man Spock might shag wasn't him.

He tried to get out of the bed and fell unceremoniously to the floor. Dr Axjerbl plucked the flannel from his hands.

"Off you go then, you're clearly not going to listen to me and you're no use to us in here until you can at least speak. Come back when the pain killers wear off."

In this time of sliding automatic doors, lock picking might be considered a redundant skill. As a child Kirk had discovered amongst his brother's possession two things; the first was a book of "pursuits for boys" from the 1960s on Earth – an old, tattered linin bound volume, detailing everything from how to trap and skin a rabbit, to how to make a pea-shooter, to how to pick a lock. The second was an old wooden chest with S. K. engraved onto it in black relief. He knew it was not Sam's chest, merely a hand me down from a previous Samual Kirk, and the mystery of what could be inside it had held him captive almost as tightly as his need to explore, then and now.

It had taken Kirk almost four hours to open the lock, even with the instructions from the book. Its contents were much older than he'd imagined, from the 1990s and the time of the Eugenics Wars. Ration books and propaganda leaflets and a resistance newspaper; a celebratory news clipping from the New York Times detailing the fall of the last of the empires commanded by the super-beings bred for power; an old chocolate bar wrapper that no longer smelled of its original contents.

Kirk was glad that he was so deeply irreverent or he might have found himself a historian instead of a captain.

Nonetheless, he was also glad for the chest, because he found himself sitting on the floor outside the dormitory picking the lock with two bits of wire. Spock had locked the old-fashioned door and stopped responding when anyone called through it, his communicator apparently broken or off. Thankfully, Kirk's fine motor skills had improved somewhat since the age of 9 and it did not take him four hours this time.

McCoy sat nearby with his back to the wall and his eyes closed, looking almost as green as Spock did under fluorescent lighting. Jim left him there to sleep as he finally managed to open the door, after just ten minutes of effort. There was probably an art to lock picking, but it was an art he was content to know only the very basics of, so long as it opened this one door for him.

The lights were off and the inside of the room was dark. Spock was not in the bed. A single meditation candle procured from nowhere burned on a plate in the centre of the floor. Kirk closed the door behind him and blinked as his eyes adjusted to the low light, trying to find Spock.

Eventually he grew accustomed enough to make out the figure, sat on the floor next to the bed with his knees to his chest. Around him were the tiny components of the earpiece, catching the flickering light.

As Kirk approached, he saw that Spock was holding the casing in a shaking hand. Around his wrist the skin looked as though it had been scratched and pierced, probably by the bed spring from the old fashioned (and now thoroughly abused) mattress, which lay on the floor near the candle. The mattress itself had a hole near the centre that looked as if it had been punched through. Spock didn't look up from the tiny magnet next to his feet.

Kirk lowered himself down next to the Vulcan and reached out slowly to take the communicator from his hand. The hand was hot and dryer than he'd expected. Spock's face was blank but his captain knew it was only a cover for pain and fear and hopelessness.

Kirk picked up the magnet for the speaker and slotted it into its place in the casing. The tiny wire that connected it to the first transistor went next, and then the actual sound processing microchip went in. Spock watched while each piece was reconnected as though it held a great importance. In went the transmitter, the receiver, the microphone, and when the communicator had been returned to something like order, he snapped the back casing over the exposed parts and into place. He turned it on and off again to check if it worked. There was a slight crackle in its microphone when he listened to himself tapping it in his own earpiece, but otherwise it seemed to be running as normal.

He held it out to Spock. When the hand took it away, it was burning even hotter and shaking harder. Jim put his own arm around Spock's back above the level of the mattress, and rubbed between his shoulders.

"I've arranged," he said, "for you to have a room to yourself." It had taken a lot of organising, and the scientist couple who lived in the room had not been happy to have to remove all of their things, although they had done so when ordered.

Spock's voice shook as he spoke, not quite as hard as his hands did. It sounded dry, but worse, it sounded lost. Small. "I do not wish to be alone."

Kirk pulled him closer and savoured his friend's scent. His heart broke a little. Spock had assumed that he had arranged some place for him to die by himself in this strange place. "I'll be there the whole time." He said.

He left Spock to drag McCoy onto a bunk, bumping his head rather unceremoniously on the headboard. He looked awful, but he'd survive to panic another day. Kirk swallowed the thought with unease, knowing full well that the same might not be true for Spock. At this rate 3, or rather 2.5 days seemed a hopeful outlook.

He half carried the Vulcan down the corridor and round a corner to the other, smaller room. The former residents had left it unlocked, and Kirk pushed Spock through the door and gently onto the bed. The body was hot and lighter than he'd've liked it to be.

"Spock, I need to talk to you."

For a moment Spock's facade slipped and he looked at Kirk as though the man was about to break up with him. He looked very young and very ill. Then it locked back into place. "About what do you wish to converse?"


	17. The Requirements

The human swallowed a lump in his throat, which at that moment felt worse than the swelling in McCoy's. "I… Bones said… That Hayves said… That you…"

Spock looked at him, too sick to even raise an eyebrow. He feared that Hayves had managed to figure out the feelings that he himself had refused to deal with.

"She said that the Pon Farr… Didn't have to be with a woman."

Spock didn't know how Hayves could have discovered this, let alone revealed it in her state. The implications of the question puzzled him. "…Negative. It can be any gender."

"So, so if there was, say, a guy here, that you, you know, liked, or maybe you just didn't mind," his captain stumbled over the words. Spock felt his internal organs going through similar motions. "..Um, melding with, uh, I'm sure I, I'm sure he'd be… happy, to do it. F- for you..."

Kirk couldn't tell if his nervousness was fear for Spock's wellbeing, that he might refuse, or the knowledge that he might very well be making both the worst and the single most important proposition of his life.

Spock did not know what to say, and so he said nothing at all. His head was filled with a blind panic. How could he look Jim in the face, with him knowing what he undoubtedly did? "Happy to do it for you"? Jim did not sound very happy at all. He was simply afflicted by a human concept of politeness. Spock was going to lose Jim as a friend, and Nyota as a lover, all for the sake of one day of poor sexual intimacy forced by cold biological fact, or he was going to lose himself. Right now the thing he was most preoccupied with losing was control.

His mind drifted back to the first time Nyota had kissed him. He had seen it coming, acted to respond in kind, expecting it to be just what it was, a kiss. His lips on her lips. He had thought understanding this particular human behaviour would not be possible. Too irrational. He had been almost confused, when it raised the hair on the back of his neck, when he had leaned in needing more. Her mouth was soft and her taste, her human taste, had been stronger than he had imagined. He had believed that humans would taste the same as himself, but their saliva was sweeter, their flesh a little more metallic. He had stood there, as cool and collected as he could manage, and drank in her scent.

He looked at Jim, who sat next to him on the bed as though he were an ill relative. He supposed, in a way, that he was. Jim cared for him on some level, even if it wasn't the same love he felt for him. Something broke in Spock's side. He fought to keep his face straight.

"But I love her." He said. And he did. He loved her deeply, passionately, in a way she had to coax out of him in private places. It was not something he said often, and he felt the betrayal more keenly, that he had said it in front of Jim and not in front of her, and was now looking at the prospect of bonding, for life, with someone who was also not her. Someone who he loved, but who could not love him in return, like Nyota did.

Jim let him lie there for a moment as he set his features back in their usual positions. "I know. She knows… Spock, you can't really believe that Uhura would prefer you to be dead than meld with someone else?"

Of course he didn't. If she loved him half as much as he loved her she'd die before she let it happen. And he desperately wanted to believe that she did. His face felt wet, but he pulled back from his captain's hand as it went to wipe the tears.

"Do not. I do not trust myself." Not to bond with you the second you touch my skin. He ignored the other interpretation of his words, which widened Jim's eyes considerably.

His head felt so hot it seemed as though he was about to pass out. It was too much. The very possibility that he could get what he needed, that Jim might… It was sending him over the edge. He had to make Jim leave, now, before it was too late anyway. His friend did not understand, had a cruel way of teasing. There was no way Kirk should have been offering himself like this.

"Please leave me," he asked. He couldn't see the human but he knew from the pressure on the bed he had made no move to get up.

"No."

He jumped at the touch of something cold and wet on his forehead. It was a washcloth. He did not remember Jim getting such a thing, but his memory was not at its best.

Jim wiped off almost a week of dirt and cave slime and misted blood from his face, before standing to rinse the cloth in a sink Spock only now noticed. The walls of the room were a creamy yellow, and even with the lights dimmed, they were too bright for him to look at.

When Jim returned, he still had the cloth in hand, and sat down just behind him. He tugged the sleeve of Spock's shirt up, forcing the fabric to stretch around the thickness of his shoulder.

"What are you doing?" Spock asked. His captain did not respond, but began to slowly wipe his arm, from the inside of his wrist, up to the top of his shoulder and down again. Spock sat rigid, but could not contain the serrated breath that cut the air between them at the cold shock. The overload of hormones in his body screamed at him to do something. Fight, flee. Fuck. He could have done all of the above at that moment. As it happened, his body was almost paralysed by indecision. He needed them all, and could obtain none. He could not fight Jim, his oldest friend. He could not flee this place. Everyone knew what he looked like, and after his behaviour 10 hours ago they all expected trouble. It took every ounce of willpower he had left to deny himself the last. He hoped that this was not a cruel human joke.

"Just helping you cool down." The human replied.

He was not helping anyone cool down. Spock's body responded to the touch like a long lost lover, and it was all he could do to keep anything "down" at all. He realised Jim was relying on the fact that Spock was fighting a losing battle. He knew, honestly, that he was also depending on Jim to persuade him.

"Do you want me to stop?" His captain asked.

Spock caught his eye for a fraction of a second, but said nothing. Jim took it as permission, and encountered no response as he pulled the hem of Spock's uniform up over his head.

The body underneath smouldered as though it could barely contain the man within it. There was dried blood on the un-cleaned arm and on his chest where it had run from his neck. It looked as though Spock had lost a fight on a freshly cut lawn. When Jim gently wiped the Vulcan's throat and chest, he heard the catching of his breathe. Spock's eyes were barely focused. The water evaporated quickly from his skin, wanting no part in what was happening.

Spock felt a prickle of shame in his chest where the blood had been smeared away. Jim had guessed it was him. He had no doubt of this now. The betrayal, it seemed, was complete. If his friend did not leave the room now, right now, he would have no way to pretend this had not happened. He could have hidden casual sex, although even now both the act and the cover up seemed illogical and unnecessary. But to hide a bond like the one he was about to form. It would be impossible. And whilst he knew Nyota did not want him dead, he knew that if he survived she would not be able to forgive him, either. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was better that she leave him angry than in mourning. This did not make it any easier.

He could not bring himself to move away or speak as Jim returned, the cloth wetter than before. The flannel brushed against his nipple, he suspected it was not by accident.

Spock attempted to dissociate from his body whilst the human did his work. He needed the space to think things through. He wondered how long he had left; after this there would be nothing he could hide. Kirk would know of four years of ever more complicated feelings. Buried lust that had nothing at all to do with the Pon Farr; the true nature of Spock's affection for him. It was all too much too quickly, which struck him as ironic, since until this point their relationship had progressed quickly to being "best friends" and then stagnated for the 18 months, since the incident with Khan. Spock knew that "best friends" did not really classify as stagnation in a relationship, but his need had always been for something more. This, too, held quite some irony. As a child and a young adult, and even for much of his time at the academy, Spock had been alone, with very few people he could consider anything more than acquaintances. T'hy'la was a word almost as strange to him then as the concepts it embodied in Standard. Now he was surrounded by people he could call friends, lovers, siblings. He even held a special affection for McCoy, although he often felt it returned buoyed by an insult.

He came back to reality with a slight jolt as the waistband of his pants rubbed over his erection through his underwear, as Kirk dragged them off. His upper body did not really feel any cleaner; instead, it felt sticky and hot. Sweating must leave humans as uncomfortable as it did dehydrated.

Vulnerable did not do his position justice. He put both his hands firmly onto the bed behind him, twisting them into the sheets as Jim ran the washcloth up the inside of his thigh. He saw red for a fraction of the second, something between pure lust and anger that Jim was intentionally tempting him. What was left of his control was leaving him now.

Jim placed the damp flannel onto Spock's underwear, allowing the cool wet to seep through the fabric as he crossed the room for something. Spock's vision cut off about 10 feet away from his face and for the few moments he was gone, Kirk was just another feature in the blur that the room had become.

Spock couldn't identify the tube in his hand when he returned. He couldn't even tell if the writing was too small or his vision too fuzzy.

Jim leant over him, his hand resting very lightly on top of the cloth, drawing out an involuntary sound. His lips moved a bare centimetre from Spock's.

"That is unnecessary," he heard his voice saying. "The Pon Farr does not require that—"

Kirk kissed him, barely a peck, just a simple brush of mouth on mouth. "I require it." He said, and that was all Spock could bear any longer.


	18. Plak Tow

(Warning: Graphic sex in this AND the next chapter.)

A small part of Kirk felt his current state of arousal to be morally repugnant. Spock was clearly as scared and upset as he was turned on, and the idea of finding another person who was so vulnerable so attractive seemed to him to be somewhat predatory. In all honesty, he could not remember being this aroused in his entire life. A heat surged out of Spock where their lips touched and filled his body with a lust he had never before encountered.

Spock nipped urgently at his bottom lip and then kissed the spot, lapping at the tender place and tasting the iron sweetness of his captain.

Despite knowing full well what the situation was, Kirk found his… friend's? Partner's? lust to be something both hot and frightening. The loss of control was so out of place that it held both the draw of something illicit and the possibility of some terrible backlash, which acted only to make it all the more sweet. Spock tasted coppery, just slightly, as though the tongue that met his as he dipped into the open mouth had recently been sucking on keys.

It was Spock who pulled away first, or rather, he pulled Jim away. Vulcan fingers held his shoulders hard enough for their tips to bruise as he suspended Kirk's torso above him. Jim inhaled air as Spock exhaled it, their lips an inch apart. It took him a moment to realise what Spock was doing, until his clothed cock brushed against Spock's own through his underwear.

Spock murmured something, the words lost to the cloud of lust he breathed out with them. The breath was hot on Jim's throat.

"What is it?" He tried to catch the Vulcan's eye, but somehow he doubted Spock could see very much at all.

"I'm burning," the first officer said with great conviction, as though it were happening to someone else. Jim had to remind himself that this was a new experience for both of them.

Spock released his iron grip on his shoulders, and he dropped down so that their chests met and their genitals pressed against each other. He bumped his forehead lightly on Spock's; it didn't hurt. Nothing hurt. Both his upper arms would be covered in little bruises.

He kissed Spock's closed mouth again, rocking his hips gently, and the hands found their way under his shirt.

Sexuality poured in through his skin where his lover touched it, so hot it almost hurt. Inhuman strength ripped his uniform and tore it aside, and Spock's body arched up to meet his newly bared skin. Too slow. Given the choice he knew Spock would be in him right now.

Knowing that if he didn't take control for a moment and lube Spock up, the Vulcan would gladly have him dry, he pushed himself away to drag off the now sticky undergarment which was all that protected Spock from his gaze. There was no big reveal as he tugged them over his cock; they were both too desperate now. Spock wrapped his arms around his head, clawing at air as though it would grant him some sort of self-restraint.

Spock's cock was proportional to his body, although not as Jim had expected it. His pubic hair was more like the hair on his head than the wire that graced his own body. The shaft was pink, not green as he'd imagined, although he could see green blood flowing in the veins under the skin, and the head was what could be described by a colour chart as "olive". The balls were big and tight, as though their contents were unusually swollen. He resisted the urge to touch them, taking the tube of lubricant, which seemed to attempt to disguise itself as toothpaste. The gel was cool against his palm. He held Spock's erection by its shaft as gently as he could, and slowly ran his open hand up its underside, from base to tip. The head dripped with warm precum, which mixed with the gel as he spread back down over the other side of the member. Spock's keening cry made his own cock jump.

Deciding he could afford to tease just a little more, he stroked the head of the penis lightly, all the way around with a finger. The pre-ejaculate spilled onto him, musky and wet.

Spock sobbed into his arms, tugging at his hair. He needed Jim now, but the human still had pants on. "Take them off!" He moaned.

Kirk jumped off the bed before Spock could rip his trousers as well as his shirt. He yanked them down along with his underpants and stepped out of both, fully aware of the eyes on his cock.

Spock looked at it, entranced by need. It would have amused McCoy that it was slightly smaller than it had been in the dream he had invaded, but it wasn't small either. It was redder than his, a little slimmer. He wanted it in his mouth, but didn't trust himself not to bite.

Instead he sat up shakily and held on to Jim by his hips, palms against the razor-sharp bones. He half pulled, half lifted the human over him so that he straddled him, his cock inches from where it needed to be.

Kirk locked his legs into place to prevent Spock from unceremoniously entering him in a single well-aimed thrust. "No. I'm gonna need at least a bit of foreplay first." He said firmly, and proffered the tube.

Spock held himself deathly still, whilst the red faded from his vision. He could easily force Jim's legs apart if he chose to, and he made himself wait until that danger had passed.

He shoved the human a little too roughly to the side, causing him to fall off of Spock and onto the bed next to him. He held Jim's knees firmly apart with his elbows, ripping the tube open at the sides and letting its contents seep onto his fingers.

The look of concentration on Spock's face was familiar, and would have warmed him at any other time. Right now, however, Kirk was already too hot, and the idea that such a simple task was taking so much control concerned him.

Spock on the other hand was amazed at the fact that he had any control at all. He was deep in the Plak Tow now, and he had never known a Vulcan to respond to anything said to them during this later stage. He wondered if this was a result of his half human heritage sparing him the worst of it, or if his mental capacity was such that it granted him more control than others. He didn't have time or capacity to dwell on the matter.

His shaking hand slick to the wrist he pressed a finger roughly into the ring of muscle between Kirk's legs. He heard the human grunt in pain but took no heed of it, adding a second finger immediately and scissoring the tight entrance almost too forcefully, as though he were used to the task and knew Jim's limits. In reality it was a lack of willpower that made him so frenzied.

"Fuck!" Jim swore as a third finger stretched him. A sensation passed from the human through his fingers. It was burning and intense, distorted by the Plak Tow, and he couldn't tell if he'd torn the muscle or touched his prostate.

Nails raised welts on his back. He moved his fingers again and Jim arched his back suddenly, a cracking noise coming from his jarred vertebrae. The hole was tight and it didn't seem to loosen as he stretched it, although it did become more pliable. Spock had been at his task for barely twenty seconds and it felt like an hour. He pulled his fingers out too quickly, and Jim hissed at the friction. Spock barely heard.

Kirk's breaths came in ragged gasps of fear and pleasure and pain. A girl had once told him the trick was to relax, but he was finding that very difficult to do right now. He just had to hope that there would be some lucid aspect of Spock whenever they finally entered the meld.

Spock seemed to be ignoring his legs as though they could hold their almost splits position the entire time, but he allowed him to hook them over his shoulders. Jim couldn't see the Vulcan's cock, but he felt it when the head nestled against him for a half second, hot and pulsing like the rest of Spock, before it plunged halfway in.

Spock may have looked young and vulnerable, boyish, earlier, but it was a man's desire that filled him now, that quite literally filled Jim as he let himself all the way in. He felt curiously powerful, the adrenaline high feeling so good it almost blinded him to the physical sensations. He felt like he had a lot of blood, of living fluid in him that would spill at any moment. Intellectually, he would have thought that the chances of him somehow managing to impregnate Jim in this arrangement were approximately 141,471 : 1 – but he wasn't thinking anything right now, and the hormones were telling him he could fertilise everyone in this colony, infected and all. The smell of human sweat and pheromones was salty and musky and sang in the air around them, or maybe only in Spock's mind. It mattered not.

Kirk groaned and bit his own tongue as Spock stretched him. It didn't hurt, per se, but the fullness of it was distinctly uncomfortable. After the jerky initial penetration, he froze for a moment. Jim couldn't see any signs of sentience in the Vulcan, so assumed quite correctly that he was already close to release. For some reason Spock's body wasn't allowing it to happen though. Too early. He felt the thought and wondered if it was Spock's or his own.

In the pause he looked up at Spock's face. He looked abstracted, his eyes glazed over, suggestive of both bliss and purgatory. There was no sweat on him, but he seemed somehow to sparkle with some sort of condensation. His eyebrows were up slightly, partially concealed by his messed up hair line, and is mouth was open.

Finally Spock's body reengaged with that primal part of his brain which was still attempting to corral this event into something resembling intercourse. He gasped as though he had been holding his breath in for a long time; and placed his hands on the bed either side of Jim.

The next few thrusts decreased in discomfort until Kirk began to appreciate the subtler pleasures of being penetrated. He could feel the unusually powerful pulse as Spock's blood surged through his member. Uncalculated movements made Spock's erection grind unexpectedly against his prostate, and the Vulcan lowered himself so that Jim's own cock was sliding against his stomach. To his own surprise, he felt the pressure building in his groin and knew he was about to cum. Just before he managed it, Spock, sensing he was close, reached between them, and gripped the base of his cock so tightly it hurt, forcing him to wait. A few thrusts later he released the hold and jerked him instead, so that he came almost immediately into the hand, spasming around Spock as the Vulcan also ejaculated. The universe contracted until all that was left of it was his body and Spock's touch. The liquid felt hot inside of him, and the orgasm rolled its way through his abdomen and back down as he spattered Spock's palm with semen.

He felt something odd within himself. Not another conscience, but then Spock wasn't one of those any more. He must have been something, however, because the connection was there, in the back of his mind, observing – a synchronised orgasm was something Kirk had only achieved a handful of times in his life, and hell had he been trying. At the very least, whatever it was gave the Vulcan excellent timing.

Spock remained hard within him, and he somehow managed for his own arousal to simply plateau instead of waning. He knew that his libidinousness was artificial, a product of Spock's Pon Farr, created by the telepathic nature of his touch. What a logical aspect of the Pon Farr, Kirk thought as he regained the ability of cognizant thought, to keep the partner aroused as you are. He doubted Spock would be able to appreciate this particular aspect of logic.

He ground down onto the humming organ, his body being taken over by that alien need. His mouth clamped onto a spot on Spock's throat, and he bit and sucked, drawing copper-green blood into his mouth as though he were dying of thirst.


	19. Blood Fever

Hayves awoke from where she had keeled over with a criss-cross of indented flesh on her cheek from the wire of the caging. With no one in sight who was uninfected the unbearable lust to spread her wonderful Master abated a little. There was a pale green substance on her chin, tiny circles of emerald where the blood rich foam from her mouth had dried out.

For an empath, this cage was particularly awful; in fact, she was able to sense the feelings of everyone in the compound, and a few parasite-addled souls outside of it. Need was everywhere, along with the release of fulfilled addictions. She tried to find the clearer minds about her, waiting for the gift she had to bring.

More powerful, though, she found a different kind of need. Her commander. He felt to her then like some animal; his every movement instinct, his thrusts no more resistible than his breathing. The telepath radiated so much of his being, simple though it was at that moment, that she could feel the bite on his neck, parallel to the faint scar from McCoy's theft of his parasite. She could feel him cumming again and again until his groin ached, and she could feel that none of that was enough, that he could cum a hundred times more before the fever was out.

Much fainter she could feel a consciousness within him; it wasn't his. Had she been saner, she'd probably have taken some sort of satisfaction from knowing she'd been right about Spock and her captain. She always liked it when she was right.

Spock fucked him until he forgot his own name and semen ran down his thighs and ruined the sheets. The same lust that drove the Vulcan also drove him, forcing him to accept the brisk pace even when the cleft between his legs was tender and bruised, and his cock so spent it could no longer keep up with the telepathic Pon Farr.

Kirk somehow managed to draw him into a kiss, and it was noisy and wet, left a string of saliva running between their mouths, verdant with the blood that had hung on his lips from the bite.

When Spock came again, he could no longer take it. It had been almost two and a half hours, crushed into that position, and Spock hadn't withdrawn from him once.

"Stop!" He shouted at Spock, knowing he couldn't hear. Before the Vulcan could begin thrusting again he unhooked his cramping legs and braced them against the pale stomach, pushing hard.

Without any kind of grip on the man beneath him, Spock slid off and rolled onto his back. He seemed a little stunned and didn't try to mount him again.

Trying his best to ignore the pain, Kirk got slowly up from the bed. As Spock had withdrawn from him, he had been followed by enough semen that there was almost an unbroken trail between the damp patch where Jim had lay and his still hard cock, which stood out from him at a perfect right angle. The white liquid was tinged with pink, and from the feel of his ass Kirk speculated that this was not some other unknown aspect of Vulcan biology.

He limped to the ensuite, taking the lubricant with him. Inside he felt raw and swollen; the pain was deep and now that his contact with Spock had been broken, it was almost too much. He found with some relief that he did not need the bathroom, probably something to do with the Pon Farr, he imagined, and instead stepped straight into the -real water- shower. He wondered that sonic ones were not employed on such a dry outpost, but was grateful nonetheless. The water ran white, then red, and he leant heavily on the wall for support.

Before he could collapse under the stream, he made himself get out. It was too tempting, but Spock wasn't finished. Dripping water on the floor, he gulped more down from the tap. Spock might not need to eat or drink for this, but he certainly did. He wrapped himself in a towel and made to re-enter the bedroom, before he decided to stop and put a finger wet with the lube up into himself. The sensation made him struggle for breath, but it would be nothing on the pain he would feel if Spock took him without it; the walls as he felt them were already burned by friction, and he was bruised internally, including his prostate, which he hadn't known could bruise at all.

When he did manage to stand again and enter the bedroom, Spock was curled on the floor with his hands over his ears, eyes screwed shut.

Spock didn't notice Jim leaving him, but when he had recovered from the pause his body had taken to recover, he found himself to be alone on the bed. Betrayal –not unreasonable, mind. Abandonment. Jim had had enough and left him to die of his fever, to burn to death. His cock was so hard it felt like it was made of alabaster, and the skin of it was almost blistered from the relentless movement. His balls felt hot and heavy, like swollen lymph nodes producing white blood cells, but in this case sperm.

He was still sick with the fever, and he shook in despair as he realised it would overcome him. He slid from the bed onto the cool floor with a thump and wrapped his arms around his head. He had been prepared to die with dignity, before the ones he loved. He would freeze to death in front of Nyota a hundred times before he would choose to die like this; pitiful, naked, uncontrollable. Weak on the floor of some colony, his relationship with her ruined, his friendship with Jim all but destroyed. He could feel the connection with his captain, but he didn't dare use it. Ashamed. What he had done was shameful, he had slept with his captain when he was pressured into it by his foolish human emotions, allowed himself to become vulnerable out of worry, and Spock had taken advantage.

They would find his body and they would know. Jim would feel guilty about not being able to save him, but in reality, he would hate him. Uhura would realise he betrayed her for no reason. That he was pathetic, ruled by lust. Because he had accepted only Jim, they would all know of his feelings.

He could barely think these things, but he could feel them, and his vision failed, contracting to shapes in the dark. He closed his eyes and covered his ears to protect them from the rush of his own blood. Where was logic now? Even his own mind had deserted him, and all that was left was emotion, as raw as his flesh. He was lonelier than he had ever been. Guiltier than he even felt for his mother. He couldn't cry about it now, there was nothing left of him to do so.

He didn't hear Jim moving around, and started at the familiar rough coolness of the washcloth against his skin. It wiped him down from head to toe. He concentrated on doing nothing as it dabbed away the semen from his member. He felt it pulsating, needing Kirk as much as he did, and he knew that if he so much as opened his eyes he would not be able to stop himself - and Jim would never forgive him. He had lost all sense of time, but he knew that the human must by now be in agony.

Go, he wanted to say. Just leave me to die. Go, I can't control myself. But he didn't, because he couldn't. To do so would break his concentration and he would be back inside his captain before he could stop it, so he simply lay there until he felt it, hot, cool, human breath on the head of his cock.

A degrading sexual act, that he had never let Uhura perform on him. Jim's tongue caressed the head lightly, and suddenly Spock was gripping his hair, forcing him down onto it and thrusting. Despite the tenderness, it felt shockingly good; cold at the base where the air passing by cooled Jim's saliva and hot at the tip in the back of his throat. Jim's gag reflex only stimulated him further, and he came quickly and hard. The human spluttered as he released his scalp, pulling off and gasping for breath, choking on stray semen that had somehow managed to enter his windpipe.

Spock was lost again to the fever. Jim spat what he could of his release onto the floor and swallowed what he couldn't. Spock's touch was a relief to him; it triggered a rush of adrenaline and endorphins, much like the parasite did to its victims. He felt his penis slowly respond to it, twitching as he looked at the Vulcan panting on the floor.

He wiped his mouth on the skin of his arm and shuffled closer to Spock's head. A little bit of reciprocation wouldn't go amiss right now. He let his cock rest on the Vulcan's cheek, precum running from the tip and into the seam of his mouth. After a few seconds, swolen lips parted. He didn't lick the juices away, but accepted Jim's erection into his mouth when he leaned over to do the same for Spock's. He felt teeth at his base as he deep throated the green phallus before him. When he pulled back slightly to simply suck, hard, on the olive head, Spock copied him. He took this to mean he liked it, letting the roughness of his tongue brush the glans as the pale hips bucked. They each lasted a little longer this time, and when Jim came it was dry and almost, almost painful. He drank Spock's essence down quickly, not wanting the warm salt of it in his mouth when he was hot and thirsty. The Vulcan did not release his still hard cock, and he didn't release Spock's either; and so it continued.

He sucked on his own finger alongside Spock, and then reached between the Vulcan's cheeks and pressed into him. Spock was actually wet inside, a little trick of Vulcan biology he hadn't known. His hole was tensing and relaxing as he let his teeth scrape ever so lightly against the slit of the cock in his mouth, and the whole thing clamped down on his finger when he finally found Spock's prostate, swollen to the size of a golf ball as it struggled to keep up with supplying semen. He stroked it gently and the writhing mass beneath him shuddered uncontrollably. He added another finger, the wet hole providing all the lubrication needed, and strummed the sensitive gland. He could feel the Vulcan's orgasm tightening around his fingers, almost enough to break them with each clench. Unintelligible noises escaped Spock's lips, slurred curses in languages only he could understand as he spurted hot into Jim's mouth.

It seemed that they could both enjoy this.


	20. Beyond the Call of Duty

(Warning: Discussion of rape; blood)

Chapter Text

At some point, Spock had passed out on top of Jim. His fever had finally broken and exhaustion had taken over from the Plak Tow immediately. After several hours of lying beneath the Vulcan, covered in cum and blood and spit, having dreams he couldn't distinguish from reality, Kirk had begun to worry. Nothing he did could stir his bedmate, Spock was unreachable. Had he known how to use their telepathic bond, he might've reassured himself, but he didn't. Spock wasn't just asleep, his head was empty and every muscle in his body slack.  
The body above him was limp and heavy and it hurt to struggle out from underneath it. His knees were too weak to carry him and he hit the floor like a piece of meat. Between his legs, an opaque red solution of semen and blood made him stick to the floor uncomfortably.  
His ass disobeyed him as he attempted to stand up, achieving instead only a steady trickle of blood. How undignified. Oh well, there was nothing for it but to do what he always did in situations he couldn't get himself out of.  
He dragged himself across the floor smearing it with bodily fluids and grabbed his own pants, fumbling through the pockets. Unable to find his own, he took out Spock's communicator and turned it on. It hummed in his ear, probably his fault from earlier. He called Bones.

An annoying sound in his own ear roused McCoy from his prolonged rest. After a minute he recognised it to be Jim's voice.  
"What?" He said rather abruptly, sitting up against his own better judgement. His neck hurt like hell. Someone had left a bottle of codeine and a syringe of precious morphine on a stool by his bed, the latter he administered to himself without a second thought. As he relaxed he noticed the digital clock on the wall. He had been asleep for 26 hours.  
"Fuck!" he shouted into the microphone. He hadn't been with Spock.  
"What? Could you just do as I asked?" Kirk said.  
"Is Spock alright? Did you find someone?" He asked the ear piece.  
"Uh… Kind of. Now can you just get your ass down the fucking corridor and in here please?" Jim meant the room he'd got for Spock.  
"What's "kind of"?" he entreated, but Kirk had already turned off the device.  
He sat for a moment, letting the painkillers do their job and then hauled himself down the corridor, ignoring the fact that his med kit was scraping along the floor and he was dressed in his underwear beneath a dressing gown he did not remember owning.  
He stood outside the door, waiting for it to slide open and then realise he had to do it himself. Who on Earth (or wherever) had thought it more appropriate to fly wood over than to use building materials mined from the planet itself? He pushed the handle down, stepped into the room, and stepped immediately back out again, feeling as though he'd walked into a nightmare, or a wet dream gone terribly, terribly wrong.  
The stench of sweat and blood and sex diffused into the hallway like the smell of cooking in his mother's house. He would not have such things going on in his mother's house.  
"For God's sake Bones, close the door!" Jim croaked at him. It took several seconds before he understand that Jim meant for him to be inside that door when he closed it.  
Jim had come to Bones for a lot of problems. He had come to him wounded, needing to get on a ship, having an allergic reaction (McCoy was willing to concede that this may have been his fault); he had come to him having independently discovered that it was indeed possible to fit one's tongue into the little hole in the vacuum tube for blood collection, but not to take it out again, and he had even come to him dead.  
McCoy supposed that he should have prepared himself for the day when he had come to him naked with his dick raw and their mutual best friend's spunk pouring out his bloody asshole, but unfortunately he hadn't.  
Spock lay face up and covered in Jim's blood and his own release, out stone cold. His cock wasn't as green as he'd imagined it to be.  
"Bones, a little help here?" He snapped back into the present and rushed forward to help hold Kirk up. The captain looked pale and ill; there was something green on one side of his face, his eyes were sunk back into his skull and his lips were cracked.  
"He didn't…" Rape you? He held Jim's shoulders protectively. They were covered in little black bruises and a single crescent shaped cut, dug into by Spock's fingers.  
Kirk managed to give him a look which told him that he was still maintaining his own invincibility above all else. "No. He was just…A bit rough."  
He held Jim with one hand whilst he scrabbled for the scanner with the other. Over all, Jim was probably going to be fine, but he went over him several times anyway.  
"I think I'm gonna be sick…"  
With the coolness only a trained medical professional could manage, McCoy lowered Kirk to the ground, supported by his own hands, and moved his dressing gown neatly out of harm's way as the contents of Jim's stomach were expelled in several gasping retches.  
The whiteness of it surprised him; of all things he had expected, Jim giving head was not one of them. He heard the doctor in him speak. "A lot of people find that semen can make them nauseous." Jim wasn't done. Another mouthful spattered to the floor. "Jesus Christ."  
Bones held his breath against the scent of cum and vomit and scooted Jim along the floor into the bathroom. He settled for dumping his fellow human into the shower in a position which was clearly hurting his ass, and then went back into the bedroom to look over Spock.  
The scanner told him his body was still in shock, but he no longer had the fever and his hormone levels were descending to normal. He couldn't tell if he was in some sort of coma or an incredibly deep state of meditation, and suspected that the two were not mutually exclusive for a Vulcan.  
Kirk woke up when he returned to the bathroom. He didn't seem as embarrassed as he ought to be, but maybe he was too tired or worried for it.  
"I'll be okay, look at Spock first," he tried to insist.  
Bones shook his head. "He'll be fine. You are gonna get a fucking infection if you don't let me do my Job." He handed Kirk his own codeine supply and watched him take two with the water from the shower. "This is so fucking far beyond the call of duty…" He complained.  
"I know." Jim looked at him. "I'm grateful."  
"Well," He said, "It wasn't my arse on the line…"  
"The next joke you make will be your last." Kirk grit his teeth as McCoy flipped him out of the shower and face down onto the bathroom rug.  
"You might wanna hold off the death threat until after I've had my finger up your ass." The cheeks were bruised purple from what he assumed was the constant slap of Spock's balls, and the crack was doing worse. He donned a pair of gloves and coated a finger in medicated ointment. "You know, on the ship I'd've just given you a pill for this, but there's none left down here, so…" He tried to ignore Jim's strangled yell and the fact that his finger came out bloody.

Spock kept his eyes closed long after he had awoken, not ready to face Jim as McCoy did his best to repair the damage. He listened to their strained conversation, and an occasional grunt or whimper; he could tell he had done something awful to Jim. He smelled blood, and sick, and he knew he was responsible. Eventually they left the room, McCoy persuading Jim that it would not be possible for him to rest here.  
Spock allowed himself to curl up and stare blankly at the wall, blocking out the blood on the mattress. His emotionless visor protected him from the worst of the misery, but he still felt it, the guilt of what he had done. He couldn't remember arriving in this room, or if he had asked for consent. He dared not touch the connection they now had. The vitriol Jim had obviously been shielding him from whilst he was in the room would be too much. He couldn't bear to be despised by someone to whom he had shown what he inevitably just had. Hated by the one he was melded with.  
When McCoy returned he forgot to reassume his original position.  
"You're awake?" He did not respond, concentrating as hard as he could as a small crack in the headboard. Maybe he was responsible for that crack. It made him feel sick.  
"You can't stay in here," McCoy told him. He felt a hand on his elbow and tried to pull away. There was nowhere to go.  
"I am too dirty to go back to the other room." His voice held unpermitted disgust and he shut his eyes, ashamed at both the outburst and the reason for it.  
"We'll clean you up." McCoy gently tugged his arm across his shoulders and put an arm about his waist, walking him to the shower, which was still on.  
Bones was being kind to him, but he didn't deserve it. He wanted to refuse the towel wrapped around his shoulders, and the way McCoy rubbed him down with it. He still felt dirty.  
He looked at his feet. There was a red stain on the bathroom rug. Jim must think him to be revolting. He certainly agreed. What on Earth had he done?


	21. Professional Relationship

Chekov knew his optimism annoyed those around him. He couldn't help it- everything had somehow turned out okay for him, for his entire life. An adored child genius; the successful attempt to save Earth, the defeat of Khan – he had even seen his captain brought back to life. He had his regrets, of course; he had been unable to save Spock's mother, and had witnessed the destruction of an entire world, six billion people. But his own family, and the one he had made on the ship for himself, remained largely untouched by the violence in the world around them. He had never faced a no win situation, and he knew he wasn't about to now.  
He soldered the far end of the central coil to its power source, the third and final one in his giant electromagnet. Early that morning, and long before his shift began, he had bounced out of bed with his tremendous idea, and had set about making it a reality immediately in his pyjamas. No one paid him any heed; he was respected here. It made him proud to be somewhere where his age was rarely used as a weapon against him, and instead made him stand out as exceptional, not a freak. He had never been bullied for it, but to be on a ship where the average IQ was in the 120s had helped him settle in.  
Now his plan was complete, and he could probably even expect a commendation: The shuttle was wrapped in 80 times in a coil of wire, coated in heat resistant material for entry to the atmosphere; the inside had one giant 300 coil ring touching two of the walls and the floor and ceiling, and a smaller 260 coil ring within that.  
Deciding it was worth wasting power to test his machine, he wired it to the main ship and diverted the current into the wires. He took off his own shoe and dropped it in the centre of the magnet's focus. It took more than a minute for the sole to finally touch the ground. It was perfect.  
He turned the power off and shoved his foot back into his shoe, hopping to the turbolift as he did so.  
Lieutenant Uhura was on the bridge as expected. For the last two days she had seemed unusually depressed, and resisted his attempts to cheer her up. He couldn't tell if she was just worried because it had been so long since they had heard anything at all, or if there was some greater problem, but he hoped his news could cheer her up.  
She was in her chair talking quietly with Sulu about weather patterns.  
"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Uhura!" She flinched at his enthusiasm.  
"What is it, Ensign?" She sighed.  
"I hawe done it, I hawe found a way to clear the atmosphere!" She considered him for a moment, her face a little less lifeless.  
"What's the plan?" She pushed herself up from her seat and followed him back into the turbolift.

Kirk lay face down on his bed, inexplicably anxious. He had attempted to speak to Spock, and got the same even replies he was used to from the Vulcan; he probed at Spock's presence in the back of his head, but got no response at all.  
He had no idea what he should be saying to Spock, or what he wanted Spock to say back, so he didn't push it. He suddenly felt very foolish. Spock had taken him out of need. He hadn't wanted to sleep or meld with Jim. He was probably embarrassed or scared for his relationship with Uhura. Why had he let himself think he was anything other than a necessity? What on Earth about Spock's desperate union with him would make him think he was anything special? It had certainly been a violation of the bounds of their friendship, and maybe a violation of Spock, too.  
"Spock, I want to apologize," He began, but was cut off.  
"There is no need." Spock said, a little too sharply. "I should also apologize to you. I hope it will not impede our professional relationship. I will never make you speak of this incident again."  
Their professional relationship? Jim wanted to argue this. He wanted to tell Spock that he would do it all again, that he valued him, cared for him; but Spock's words left no room for him to do anything but keep quiet.  
He couldn't just leave it though. He needed to break Spock's outer shell; there was no way he could just let their friendship go, even if anything else was out of the question.  
Before he could decide what to say, he heard a buzz from his communicator. He jammed it into his ear expecting Arros' voice.  
"Kirk?" It was Uhura.  
"Uhura?" He sat up as best he could, and so did Spock. "How the hell did you manage to clear the ion storm?"  
Spock's eyebrows were above his hairline. Kirk couldn't tell if his greener-than-normal complexion was a result of too much blood in his cheeks or too little. A pang of guilt came from nowhere. Why did he feel guilty? Hadn't he just saved her boyfriend? No. It wasn't his guilt. It was Spock's, invading his mind through the meld.  
"We had to sacrifice a shuttle. Chekov rigged it so that it carried enough electromagnets to draw the ions out of the storm to a place about eighteen kilometres south of you. You're still in the storm, but most of the ions scrambling our signals are all down their now. We managed to move about 2,900 tons. It should be safe to beam you up. Is Spock there?"  
"Yeah, he's…" The words stuck in his throat. He looked to Spock, who took out his own earpiece.  
"Hello Lieutenant," He said, as though nothing was wrong.  
"Spock! I was so worried about you!"  
Jim pulled his earpiece out and rolled over in the bed, wincing in pain. He told himself that he wasn't trying to ignore their conversation, he was just giving them privacy. He looked up and found Bones awake to meet his gaze, and willed himself to look tired instead of disappointed before he slammed his head back into the pillow.

When they had all prepared themselves for beam up, Spock dressed neatly in his uniform, Kirk in his black undershirt and Bones in the now rather musky dressing gown, Spock turned to them both.  
"I would appreciate if you did not mention recent events to Lieutenant Uhura." He said crisply. "I will relay what I must to her myself; if the two of you, and anyone else who knows what happened would refrain from talking about it unless she approaches you, I would be very grateful."  
There was no disagreeing with that, so they both nodded.  
"Energize."

Uhura rushed to Spock, reaching him almost before he was completely in the room with them. She kissed him hard, but although he responded she sensed he was rattled by something.  
"Thank God!" She sighed, putting her hands on his face and titling it so that she could check if he was alright.  
"I would like to speak to you in private," he said, quietly, so that only she could hear.  
"The three of us, all in sick bay, now," Bones announced.  
"I would like to request a brief stop at my own chambers first," Spock looked at him for permission.  
"You have half an hour in your…Chambers. Then I want you in the sickbay. Got that?"  
Uhura led Spock not to his room but to hers, relinquishing her responsibility to Scotty.  
The door slid shut behind them and she pulled him into an embrace. He lent into it a little stiffly.  
"Are you okay? What the hell happened? Dr Axjerbl said you'd been infected by a parasite that's taken over the whole of Colony 1 and turned it into zombies!"  
Spock looked surprised, as though he'd forgotten the event entirely.  
"I am quite alright. The parasite was removed," The pause he left was too long.  
"…But?" she asked, dreading the answer. She rubbed both his arms up and down, until she noticed a dressing on one and held it up before her. "You're injured."  
"It is only a minor wound. It is from the bite that infected me…" He swallowed. "But we have little time before I am expected back at the sickbay, and this is not what I came to tell you."  
The silence gnawed at Spock's stomach like Uhura gnawed at her own lip. She composed herself and squeezed both his shoulders. "What is it? You can tell me."  
"Whilst I was on the planet's surface… The heat or the hormones from the parasite, they, triggered something in me. The Pon Farr." He looked blankly at her even though his voice shook a little.  
"Your… Mating cycle?" She asked. He had warned her once of it. After the first time they had had sex, he had admitted to her that he had been a virgin, that he had always imagined that he would only ever have sex during the Pon Farr. There was a bite on his neck. She wanted to close her eyes against it, but she couldn't look away from him.  
He nodded. She realised she was gripping his arms too hard and let go, her hands falling to her sides. She'd had a few boyfriends before, and she knew she'd been cheated on in the past. But this was Spock, and because it was the Pon Farr, she wasn't even really allowed to blame him.  
She went and sat on the foot of her bed, staring at the dresser on the opposite wall.  
"So you… Found someone else…"  
The silence pressed in on her chest, but she forbade herself from getting upset.  
"It was unavoidable," Spock told her. "I was presented with the decision of dying, or… Mating with—"  
She shut him up by putting her hands momentarily over her own ears. "I don't want to know. You did what you had to do, Spock. I don't want to know who she was, your safety is enough. Let's just move on and pretend like this didn't happen."  
All she could hear was his quiet sigh.  
"Okay," he said.  
But he could not.


	22. Shower

Jim had been confined to sickbay with Spock and McCoy for two days now. Despite his own condition, McCoy had to be in charge of their care himself, as all other qualified staff with the exception of a rather skittish nurse had been beamed down to the surface, alongside most of their medical supplies. Kirk didn't want a single team down there on the surface without someone trained to remove parasitic bodies, and the Colony 2 scientists were struggling as it was.  
In the next room the nurse was keeping Lieutenant Hayves heavily sedated; she had been operated on by another doctor before beam down and given a heavy dose of a drug to stop the parasite eggs in her system from hatching. Nonetheless, McCoy had extracted tens of tiny worms from her bloodstream and saliva, and her eyes were still red when a torch was shone into them.  
McCoy himself had refused their request for separate rooms, saying that he was too ill himself to be traipsing around after the both of them whilst the officer next door had worms. Unfortunately, forced confinement with him hadn't made Spock any more desirous to talk, so he distracted himself with McCoy, who seemed to still be experiencing a degree of distress from the events of the past week.  
"For gods sake Jim, I'm a doctor, stop worrying about me," Bones tried to rebuff him for the look of concern he had cast in the doctor's direction. It was smoke and mirrors, he really wasn't looking well, and the only eye contact Jim had received from Spock had come the night before, when the man had sat bolt upright in bed clutching at his throat and choking loud enough to wake them both.  
"Have you seen yourself?" He sighed and let it drop, patting him on the shoulder and ignoring the pain in his rectum as he bounced up from the bed.  
"You can forget it Jim, I'm not letting you out early. Get back on the bed before your ass starts leaking blood again." McCoy teased dismissively. He knew this wasn't a real possibility. He should heal fine with that nurse fingering him and an IV food supply for the next several days. He would have laughed were it just the two of them in the room.  
Spock tensed where he was lying on the biobed, and his face fell to the side, facing away from the pair. McCoy seemed not to notice, but it still bothered Kirk. He couldn't tell if Spock was avoiding talking about the Pon Farr or talking to him, and the latter prospect made him anxious. He wanted to return Spock to work as soon as possible, if only to force him into interaction without literally having to order it.  
Though he would never admit it, Kirk was beginning to feel a little used. He knew, objectively, that Spock had not chosen for it to be so, and that he had offered himself up knowing that he was doing so to fulfil that need for Spock. Well, he chose to believe that was why he did it. But still, he felt as though he had been fucked and thrown away like the tissues he'd had strewn about his dorm at the Academy.  
Still, he had more to deal with than Spock right now; he had already disobeyed McCoy and contacted Starfleet Command several times, to discuss the possibility of invasion. There were several species they now knew were immune to infection by the parasite, and he was determined to keep this as military an operation as possible, to prevent it getting into the hands of Section 31, although their hands had been rather few and far between since Khan had arranged for one of their main buildings to be blown up 18 months ago.  
For now there was nothing he could do, except to send help with the clean up operation on the colony and sit, awkwardly but restlessly, on his bed in sickbay with machines blinking at him.  
The boredom was agonizing. He jumped back out of the bed. "I'm gonna have a shower." He said before Bones assumed he was making an escape. He tried to catch Spock's eye as he left the room, but found himself quite obviously ignored.  
Oh well. Spock might be ignoring him, but that didn't mean he had to ignore Spock. The shower in the sickbay was one of its few luxuries; certain treatments were not compatible with sonic showers, so it possessed the option of a real one instead.  
He supposed Bones would advise against it, but he didn't really care that he was jerking off a cock that was still sore from overwork. He felt a little guilty when his thoughts drifted not to the many girlfriends and anonymous women and aliens of no particular gender, but to Spock as sucked his cock and came in his throat; hot and hard and wet. What he wouldn't do to fuck that tight wet hole between Spock's legs. To have his dick rubbing against that sweet spot up inside him and not his fingers. To hear Spock, relinquishing his control not to some fever, but to the pleasure Jim was giving him, to hear him cry Kirk's name and not the senseless utterances of the Pon Farr – not that Jim had had any problem with those. He wanted Spock to want him as deeply as he had that day, but without the interference of some sort of mating cycle.  
Then he felt it, a familiar sense of surprise through the two locked doors between him and Spock. It was too late now, he was already cumming into his hand, his semen joining the stream of water that hit the wall of the shower. The moment he was done, he turned off the water and stepped out of the cubicle, standing for a long time in front of the mirror. Shit. He realised instantly the level of violation he'd just committed. Of course Spock would have to have felt that, they were bonded together as mates for just such a purpose. He hoped Spock had only felt his pleasure and not seen inside his head, but he knew instinctively that this wasn't the case. No one was ever surprised when Jim's sexual escapades were revealed.

Spock knew he could look away, shield himself, ignore what he was seeing in Jim's head. He wasn't sure exactly whose privacy was in fact being violated the most by what was happening, but he knew that one aspect of it was up to him to prevent. He had broken down the door, as his mother had once told him after he had melded with her by accident as a child. You must always remember to knock. He could stop watching, but a little part of him didn't want to, a part of him which he wanted to attribute to the meld, but which had been there long before the Pon Farr.  
He was experiencing a memory, the Pon Farr from Jim's perspective. He couldn't remember the oral sex, but he was vaguely aware that it had happened.  
The imagined Spock was insensible, shaking, clean only from his recent scrub down at Jim's hand. He sucked on Jim's cock with no particular goal other than to do so, jerked into Jim's mouth, accepted the finger and gave a wordless cry as it brushed his prostate. He could feel it, the raw lust and overwhelming pleasure of it. His fingers digging into Jim's thigh, the flat of Jim's tongue on the head of his penis. And he could also feel Jim's own pleasure, the ache in his cock and groin from too many orgasms, the taste of salt, the smell of sex and sweat, the sting of his ass.  
Spock crushed his erection with a thought, but didn't have the willpower to withdraw from his captain's mind. Suddenly the image, the sensation changed, and Spock was shocked to find Jim's thoughts departing from the true course of events. He knew they had not done this, Jim had not taken him. The imaginary Spock called out Jim's name. The real Spock panicked. The daydream shattered and he withdrew from his captain's mind, caught red handed as a human might say. What would Kirk say to this? He knew that he and his Jim were - He caught himself mid thought. He would not permit a possessive adjective to be used before Jim's name, even if he could justify it for his title. Jim was objectively everyone's captain on the Enterprise, was he not?  
He didn't remember having sat up, but he maintained the position and tried to slow his breathing.  
He could not allow this to happen again; he was a fool for letting it happen this time. He was taunting himself, spying on Jim and probably breaking several laws in the process. The illogic of his own behaviour made him want to berate himself, but it would do no good.  
He could not allow Jim to bring this up, as he knew he would not be able to lie about his feelings. It was better if he made certain that it was not to be talked about at all.

McCoy would never forgive Jim if he allowed himself to catch a chill on top of everything, so he took up a towel and wrapped it around his own shoulders. He dressed as slowly as he could, mind and pulse racing with the adrenaline his body always pumped out in response to everything going wrong. He felt almost as though he were dizzy or that his own movements were unreasonably slow.  
When he returned to the room, McCoy wasn't there, probably tending to Hayves, but Spock was sat up in bed with a posture that seemed to convey a severity his face did not.  
Jim sat mechanically on his own bed, a shiver running up his spine that made his nostrils flair. He swallowed the lump in his throat, but it stuck painfully in his larynx.  
"I must apologise," For a second Kirk thought that he himself had spoken, but it was Spock. "For being so uncommunicative. I have been tired from the Pon Farr. I must also thank you, Captain, for intervening. I do not wish you to believe I would rather have died, or rather have... Dealt, with anyone but you in the absence of Lieutenant Uhura."Jim knew those words were not meant to inspire the hope they did. "Indeed, I am somewhat glad she never got to see me in such a state. I regret that you did so, and I do not wish for either that or the confusing influence of the meld to interfere with our friendship or out capacity to work as an effective team. The situation on Tau Ceti IV is definitely in urgent need of our full attention. I believe that evidence of the source may be found somewhere on the planet's surface, if we were to clear enough of the ground level ion interference in the area around the shuttle."  
Kirk sat mutely as Spock turned the conversation irreversibly from what he knew was a flat denial of his emotions to work related matters. The confusing influence of the meld? He knew that was intended to invalidate his attraction, and it was at that moment as effective as his earlier reference to their "professional relationship". There was so much he had needed to say in between the two conversations that the Vulcan had silenced. He knew it had been on purpose, so he said nothing. Still, he was as relieved as he was disappointed and the adrenaline was ebbing away.  
"I'll order a team to go down there with tricorders and patrol the area on foot tomorrow." He said, as though he were talking to someone inconsequential, keeping hi face expressionless. Spock was rubbing off on him in more ways than one.


	23. Deja Vu

Uhura waited for Spock to show up. She had visited him once in sickbay, but had felt too awkward to stay for long. Kirk hadn't met her gaze, maybe because he knew what had gone on down on the colony and was embarrassed.  
Her knotted emotions had dissipated over the last three days and she was no longer feeling the hurt she had when she found out about the Pon Farr incident. She had promised herself when they first got together that she would attempt to see the logic in all things Spock; there was simply no point in not doing so, she would only come out of any arguments annoyed that she had taken the irrational stance.  
Presently, the sliding door to her quarters opened and Spock stepped into the room. He looked clean and healthy in his fresh uniform, despite being a little thinner than she'd have liked.  
"Nyota," He took a deep breath and she knew he was about to apologise. She crossed the room before he could do so, and wrapped her arms about him.  
"It's okay. It's okay." He accepted her gentle kisses and allowed her mouth to brush away tears that had never fallen from his cheeks. Sadness and confusion came into her where their lips touched. She stroked his back and his hair, but she knew that this was Spock and she couldn't heal his ailment with human gestures of affection.  
She led him to her bed and sat down, pulling him so that he leaned against her. She kissed his eyebrows and his ears, more for her benefit than his. She did it to remind herself that she loved all of him, his Vulcan side included; other people often treated him as a challenge, to bring out his hidden emotions, expecting some sort of great catharsis. She knew, though, that he had his own way of dealing with these things, and that he needed as much support in going through his own steps to reassure himself as he did in showing the emotion.  
She had a hundred questions to ask, but for now the weight of his head on her shoulder and the scent of Vulcan and Spock in her room was enough. She let him fall into his meditative trance against her, and lay them both back on the mattress, where they were meant to be.

Sulu had never been so thankful for the restoration of the normal chain of command. He never wanted a minute of responsibility for something as big as the Enterprise again if it killed him, even if all he had been in charge of was ensuring that the orbit didn't decay and communications were maintained with Starfleet Command. Now Kirk was here he was safely back to his position as helmsman, and Uhura hadn't murdered anybody.  
For about a week the bridge had been filled with ensigns and junior grade lieutenants whose names he'd kept forgetting and who were invariably too eager to please. He'd been surprised by how much he'd missed working with Chekov, who had spent much of the last week in Engineering. His replacement had been staggeringly bland and had said no more than three or four sentences to him over the whole period.  
Now the boy genius was back, proudly telling everyone who would hear about how he had managed to clear the ions from the atmosphere. Sulu didn't mind that he'd endured the anecdote four times now, he found the excitement sweet.  
"And now I zhink if I could just get zhe current in zhe shuttle switched off, I could use it a second time furzher from zhe current location and we could search zhe area using zhe ship's sensors, Keptin?" He looked expectantly at Kirk in the captain's chair. "It would have to be anozher space jump, but I could do it!"  
Sulu knew Jim was about to crush the hope in the young ensign's eyes. Chekov had barely any military experience, none at all in fact, and there was no way he'd be sending down a boy who was still a full year younger than the next youngest Academy graduate on the ship.  
"Do you need to be the one to disconnect the power?" Kirk asked him.  
"Well... No, but..." Pavel sighed and slumped back into his chair, just mature enough not to plead.  
"I'll go down with a security team and another engineer."  
Sulu ruffled Chekov's hair apologetically, his hand staying tangled in the golden curls just a second longer than it needed.  
"You must teach me how to fight." He pouted. Sulu doubted that fencing capabilities were Jim's main concern when the prognosis was possible invasion.  
"Sure," he said anyway. He could do with the practice.

McCoy attempted to tell Jim he was too ill to manage a space jump but found himself ignored. He didn't have time to persist in his condemnation of the plan, however, as he wanted to give drugs that would prevent any parasite reproducing to each of the four members of the security team and the engineer who would be space jumping with them.  
Spock had climbed into the captain's chair with an air of relief, he'd noted. He supposed it must be strained between them at the moment, but they seemed to have talked a little more in the last day and a half and he was thankful for small mercies.  
The crew of the space shuttle tolerated his probing and injections without complaint and took their places holding the bar which would position them for launch with much more grace than he had several days ago. Their acid suits would have to stay on once they were on the surface this time to protect them from the ions surrounding the shuttle-come-electromagnet. Hopefully they were resistant to human teeth as well as acids and alkalis, he thought.  
"Look after yourself Jim," he said as forcefully as he could. "Anyone gets bitten down there I want you to beam up the second that shuttle gets moved off. I mean even one of you I want whole team back here, understand?"  
"No one is going to get bitten." Kirk said stubbornly. "I'll contact you as soon as the shuttle is out of the way and the ion interference cleared."  
It was as good as he was going to get, because all staff apart from the pilots and those space jumping were being told to leave the shuttle. He stood and watched the door closing, feeling tired with the unfairness of it all.  
Spock did not come to see them off.

Kirk had deja vu as the heat hit him. A little thrill of fear ran up his spine, although he reminded himself that they were sticking together this time and there was no missing Spock. There was also no doctor to projectile vomit everywhere. The black ion cloud had started much lower here, and now he was on the ground his vision persisted for only a few metres in front of his face.  
He looked about blindly, his communicator useless, until suddenly someone grabbed his arm. It was the engineer, Ensign Mehta, whose first name he forgot. The middle aged ensign trudged towards the faint signal on his tricorder and Jim followed as the cloud got denser and denser. He was afflicted by the strangest sensation of his own body being pushed and pulled by the magnetised cloud that was causing a red light to blink on his breathing apparatus and scratching the visor of the acid suit. He couldn't tell if the security team was behind them or not, but either way they were only a few dozen metres from the shuttle and they could find them afterwards.  
He could see almost nothing now but they had reached what must have been the shuttle, a huge black hulking thing where the ions were so dense around it that Mehta was having to use his entire body weight to move them out of the way to get to the cut off switch Pavel had mercifully put on the outside.  
Jim had expected the huge cloud of impossibly fine dust to collapse in on them when the switch was flicked, but instead it hung in the air, losing density as the irresistible magnetism of the shuttle ceased and the ions in the atmosphere repelled each other.  
Mehta was still working, resetting the auto pilot and timers and climbing inside the shuttle through its hatch to check over the circuitry.  
Then the ensign rushed back out, grabbing Jim again and shouting at him, "Run, run!"  
And they ran. The shuttle's thrusters turned on and the heat it threw out brought the men from uncomfortable to unbearable, as it surged upwards and south.  
For a moment the cloud remained behind, as choking as it had ever been, and then the timer tripped and the electromagnets turned back on. It was like being caught in a tornado; the ion cloud rushed to catch up with the shuttle at gale-force speeds, bowling Jim over like a child's doll. He could no longer see Mehta, and began to worry that he would be dragged off by the wind – and then the cloud was gone and the air cleared. Mehta was sitting up on the ground a few paces ahead of him, and a member of their security team was sprawled nearby, her visor cracked from what would have been a particularly nasty bump on the head; she was lucky to have been wearing the suit.  
The trio gathered themselves together.  
Kirk tried to contact the remaining three security staff on his earpiece, but no one copied him. He span about trying to see anyone out cold on the ground, but he could not. Now the air was clear he got his first good look at the landscape. The ground itself was a yellowish colour which seemed orange due to the light of the sun spilling in through the stratosphere, Rayleigh scattering turning it a burnt orange-red. They were on relatively high ground, and he could now see the previously ominous shape of Colony 1 in the distance, shining orange on its hill. No wonder they called it Amber City. He took off the helmet and stepped out of the damaged acid suit, leaving it on the ground. It was far too hot for that.  
"Kirk to Enterprise," he tried the other frequency.  
"Copy," Uhura's voice replied. "Putting you through to Commander Spock."  
It all seemed in that brief time that everything was normal.  
"Captain, we are able to detect only yourself and two others close to your location, can you get a visual fix on the remaining members of the team?" Spock asked him.  
"No, we lost them in the cloud. They can't be far though." He said.  
"Negative. There are only three life forms within two hundred fifty metres of your current location, and those within seventeen kilometres are all infected with the parasite." Spock informed him.  
Chekov's voice interrupted them. "Sir, zhere is a large metil object six hundred metres from where you are now. Th-thirty metres long and seven metres in diameter. It looks like a ship, heavy shielding, I cannot tell if there are life forms aboard or not."  
He considered the situation for a moment.  
"Captain, it would be logical for you to continue on to the object. I could beam down additional security officers to your location, and we could continue the search for the missing crew members remotely." Spock's flawless logic didn't seem to be failing him, despite everything.  
"There's no point beaming more officers down, we've lost enough already. Locate the missing crew and get them over to us pronto. Chekov, I want the coordinates for the object."  
Coordinates given and search under way, he beckoned the other two to follow him towards the signal. "Set your phasers to stun but be prepared to change to setting seven if necessary." He was reluctant to give an order to kill, but he suspected that whoever had released the parasite onto the colony didn't share his misgivings.  
"Detecting infected humans nearing your position, Captain." Spock told him. "Be vigilant around the object, its shielding prevents us from detecting any lifeforms underneath it as well as inside."  
"It could be a trap," he chose to voice his fears. "Do you detect any life forms between us and the object?"  
"No Captain, and I would not recommend changing your course or returning to your original position, there are now a total of twenty-two infected individuals within one hundred and fifty metres of your position. There are none directly between you and the object at this moment but there are several who could reach it before yourselves."  
Jim kept his march towards the coordinates, his knuckles white on his phaser. He was more concerned by his inability to see the infected than by the possibility of their being so close by. Cautiously they mounted a small ridge and could see dull metal ahead of them. The landscape here was rugged, angular rocks jutting up from the floor of the valley, as high as six story buildings. He would never see anything coming in this.  
Still, he had little choice but to carry on.  
"There are infected individuals within 70 metres of you now, Captain."  
"Make sure you're ready to beam us up if this all goes to shit." He told Spock, and began picking his way across the uneven ground towards the object.  
As they got closer the rock formations crowded around them like an oppressive twenty first century city scape.  
The metal object was indeed a ship; a mobile Federation science lab, from the look of it, and one in need of some repair.  
A sound Kirk had often heard in situations where someone had been tortured sent Mehta's hands over his ears and Jim's finger to the button of his phaser, but the great walls of rock bounced the noise around until they could no longer find its origin.  
"Captain, there are five infected humans within thirty metres of your position!" Even Spock's voice had a hint of urgency. Kirk brought them to a halt to look around for the approaching threat. "Captain they're on you!"  
The woman from the security team fired her phaser at something in his peripheral vision, and he turned to Mehta, about to give the order to energize only to find the engineer pinned to the ground by a huge man whose gnashing teeth sliced the flesh of his shoulder to rags. His officer's mouth opened in a wordless scream as something hit the back of Kirk's head with a fleshy thud.  
"Fuck-!" He shouted before his ear slammed into the floor, shattering his communicator.


	24. The Invasion

"Beam them up." Spock commanded. The transporter room did not respond. "Beam them up, that is an order!"  
A timid voice replied, "Impossible sir. I can't even tell who's who and Kirk's signal has just disappeared."  
Spock said nothing, but stood and walked to the turbolift.  
"Spock!" Uhura blocked his path. "You can't go down there, the ship needs a first officer. If Kirk is dead-"  
He cut her off. "He is not dead. The Enterprise needs its Captain, and it is my job to ensure his safety."  
His voice was even but she knew better than to probe him for emotion. She shouldn't have said he could be dead, Spock would never let his best friend die so easily.  
"He is alive," he said with surety. "And I will beam down and find him. Contact Starfleet Command, inform them of what has happened. I believe there is an 81 percent chance that what we are experiencing is an invasion."  
He brushed past her and pushed McCoy out of his way.  
"There's no way in hell you're going wi-" The doors shut out the doctor's voice as they closed leaving Spock alone in the lift. He refused to take heed of what should have been panic and told himself that what he was doing was the best thing for the ship and not just for Jim.  
He did not go straight to the transporter room, but to the armoury. The officer on duty obligingly armed him "to the teeth" and provided him with protective clothing. He decided it would be worth also bringing a blowtorch. He turned without thanking her and stepped back into the turbolift. He tried to probe the bond with Jim in his mind, but got no response; the bond was still present, though, so he kept himself calm with the knowledge that this probably meant the human was still alive.  
When he arrived at the transporter room both Bones and Nyota were already there and both standing on the lit pads.  
"Get off." He told them. "You are not coming with me."  
Nyota shook her head and neither of them obeyed his orders.  
"Security please ensure that Lieutenant Uhura and Doctor McCoy remain on this ship." He went to stand on a still available pad.  
"What?" Bones shouted at him. Nyota also wore an expression he supposed was outrage.  
"You are to remain on the Enterprise. Please excuse me if calling security was an unnecessary precaution, but from each of your past records it seemed logical to ensure you would both comply." He spoke over them to prevent an argument as four members of security entered the room and walked the pair of them out.  
He looked to the control pad to find Chekov operating it. "Sir, are you to beam down inside the object or next to it where we last saw zhe Keptin?"  
"Beam me to Captain Kirk's last known coordinates. When you're ready."  
And then his vision of the transporter room disappeared, blocked by swirling light, only to be replaced by an oppressive heat. Just up ahead of him he could make out the top of what had to be a ship above a sharp wall of rock. It looked to be a Federation vessel, possibly for research or scouting.  
He looked about for signs of the three crew members who had been there only minutes before. The last joint of a human finger lay a few metres away from him, oozing blood and cooking gently in the sun. It wasn't Kirk's finger, and he justified his relief at this fact as being for the best interests of the Starfleet. His tricorder read nothing in the immediate area beyond bare rock and the shielded mass of metal behind it. He didn't need it to know Jim was in the ship.  
He held his phaser firmly. Set to kill.  
"There is no indication as to where they went, although the ship ahead would seem the logical answer to that question." He told whoever on the Enterprise who was listening.  
There was no surprise that it was Nyota. "Spock, it looks like all but two of the infected people have moved away to the west of you. I'd follow them, I don't want you going in there on your own, we have no idea what we'll find."  
"We will find Captain Kirk." He said, aware that he must sound stubborn. "I sense that he is up ahead of me."  
"How? We're not getting any readings from up here. Has something come in on your tricorder?"  
"No," He attempted to find a logical way to avoid the uncomfortable revelation, and failed. "I am able to sense him through the bond from our mind meld."  
There was an awkward silence which he did not attempt to fill with information as he walked slowly on the parched earth, rounding the jagged tower of rock. The ship before him was indeed a Federation science vessel, probably originating on Earth. It had not answered Nyota's attempts to communicate with it.  
"Check records for a ship, NCC-11934, name Lamark." The ship was definitely not thirty by seven metres; it was an Oberth class vessel with only a part of the front saucer section uncovered by the ground. He could find no logical reason for it to have landed in such a position, but the impact course was precise and the ejecta minimal for such a big collision; someone had clearly intended to park it that way up, even if there seemed to be no benefit from doing so.  
"It's a science vessel meant to be doing biological research on a moon off of UV Ceti I." Uhura told him, her voice a little strained.  
"UV Ceti is a flare binary, there is no chances of life ever existing on that moon. Why would the Federation send a research vessel there?" He walked around the hull trying to find some kind of entrance, but he had never served on an Oberth vessel and he could only assume that there was some other way in via a buried part of the starship.  
"Classified." Which meant of course that it was Section 31 work. He wondered what it was they were doing that required it be kept so out of the way.  
"It looks like our "invasion" may have its origin closer to home than we had thought." He wondered if saying such things could get him fired. Maybe worse. "I am unable to locate an entrance. I intend to use a torch to cut through the hull. I will require that the Enterprise use the forward phasers to lower the shields."  
"Forward phaser banks ready Commander," Came the familiar Scottish lilt. "I'd get back if I were you."  
Spock was already the minimum distance required by Starfleet regulations, but he took a few more steps to be sure. "Fire." He ordered.  
The light where the phaser hit the shielding was too bright for even his double lidded eyes to look at, and he backed, dazzled, into one of the towering angles of rock. Before the weapons stopped firing and it was safe to look about him, he felt a brilliant pain in his right arm, just below his shoulder. He flailed to his his assailant, but they were already gone.  
The light died, and although the pain in his arm did not, he was able to look down at it. Copper blood spilled out around a fresh bite mark which had pierced his uniform but not torn it. The burn of it sang through his abused flesh and forced him to use the rock to maintain his balance.  
"Shields down to zero Commander. Is everyzhing alright? Your frequency shows your arm is injured and you are in a mild shock." Chekov added to the fray. It was all getting too confusing for him to keep up.  
He swallowed the bile and ignored the vertigo that pulled the rock away from him and span him upside down. The mission, his personal mission, had to go on. "Everything is fine. It is a minor injury that may be tended to once I have found Captain Kirk." He could hear Uhura's tense breath hissing slightly in his ears. "Are there any life signs within the ship?"  
"Unusual readings, sir. It seems zhere is some piece of equipment inside interfering.  
Pain is psychological. He closed the distance between him and the hull, choosing a spot he predicted would have little between himself and the interior; he didn't want to be damaging important electronics if he could avoid it. His arm felt hot and it protested when he moved. The skin felt tight from the swelling as though he didn't have enough of it. He ignored these things, though, and decided against the blowtorch. He'd be better off using his phaser for this.  
He aimed and fired, and again, and again. Eventually the thick metal began to soften, and he used the torch to melt a reasonable outline for a door into it, before blasting out its centre.  
He allowed a minute for the metal to cool. It wasn't long enough, but he was not interested in preventing small burns on his own person, he had greater priorities. It bothered him that he could not identify the drive to do this. Duty never evoked any emotion in him, and this was by no standard the first rescue mission he'd been on for Jim; it was an accepted part of their friendship as it was their professional relationship. He could only conclude that this behaviour was a result of his bond with the human, that his instinct to protect his mate was compelling him to leave the ship without its first or second in command to recover Kirk. The quietness of the bond also worried him, for quite different reasons.  
No, he would not wait another minute for his "door" to cool. He slipped inside, careful not to touch the edges.

After Spock had entered the ship there had been no contact, but Uhura could not help but feel a twist in her gut that she knew was not from her concern for his well-being. She could do nothing to re-establish contact, and the distortion from whatever was in the ship was blocking her from watching Spock's frequency.  
Instead of staying at her redundant post, she caught up with McCoy in sickbay and cornered him. She would have to phrase this delicately, if he thought he was breaching confidentiality he would never give her anything.  
"Uhura. Are you alright?"  
"Yeah, I'm fine, I just, um, wanted to talk to you about the bond between Kirk and Spock."  
He looked at her suspiciously. "What about it?"  
"You know the one I mean." She rebuffed him, trying to sound like she knew more than she did. "The mind meld. He said it could help him find Kirk, how does that work?"  
"I'm not entirely sure, but I'd believe him if he's said it." The doctor was careful.  
"He said he doesn't know that much about it but that you might know a bit more. I know you're not an expert on Vulcans, but..."  
Bones shrugged. "I doubt it. Neither of them have really told me much about it, I thought it was better to leave it a while, because it was too soon."  
The knot tightened as her hunch became something far too concrete. Oh yes, McCoy was careful, but he was not careful enough. "I would be surprised if there wasn't some awkwardness," she said as coolly as she could manage. "After all, they did, you know..."  
Bones stepped innocently into the trap of false security she had left him. He laughed a little nervously. "Yeah, I guess it's probably just worse because he's the only one Spock would have-"  
He stopped suddenly, seeing her expression. The confirmation hit her like a truck, and the fact that Spock had requested Jim reversed back over her. Her reaction was profoundly physical and unexpected. "Shit."  
She said nothing and allowed him to sit her on a bed. "He didn't tell you who it was did he? Why the fuck would he do that?" Bones had the grace to sound angry on her behalf.  
She knew that it was she who had refused the information, but she still couldn't quite believe he had still withheld it from her. When he had mentioned the meld, something had clicked into place, and now it was no longer a necessary fuck with an anonymous woman. Spock had requested Jim as his mate. The fact that he could still use the bond from the meld told her all she needed to know. He had mated with Jim, and knowing Vulcans, it was probably for life. She couldn't decide whether she was going to be sick or have a panic attack, so she let Bones put her head between her knees and inhaled when he told her to do so.


	25. Everybody's Mother

For some reason, Spock had anticipated a greetings party. He was pleased to find no such thing as he lurched in through the hole. The artificial gravity generator was for some reason still on despite the ship's vertical positioning, and he stumbled until he found a way to stand in which both the planet and the ship's gravity equalled out. The effect was disorienting, although he doubted such a measure was needed as the lighting was dimmed to night levels.  
His inner ears evidently did not find this equilibrium, and the entire ship seemed to spin about him. He stopped for a moment needing to tend to his arm. He didn't want to, but he tied it off just above the bite anyway. It wouldn't help if any parasites made it to a blood vessel deep enough, but it wasn't worth the risk. Although there was no chunk taken out of him like his last encounter with an infected person had resulted in, the teeth had broken his skin like human skewers and it reminded him of the bite he had found on his neck when he awoke from the Plak Tow. He banished the thought from his mind, knowing his body would never withstand a second onslaught of the Pon Farr so soon after the last one. Either way, he doubted his body would respond to such a disruption to his cycle the same way this time.  
He half walked, half fell through the maze within the Lamark, unsure of where he was headed for and unable to access the computer. He felt as though Jim was in here somewhere, but the ship was 120 metres long of passageways and dead ends, and the layout permitted for many small isolated compartments and laboratories. The climate controls were set to a more comfortable temperature, and he told himself it was the contrast that made him shudder.  
If he had been open to such feelings, the atmosphere would have held a dark promise to it, but he was not one for instinct in such matters. Still, something was incorrect, besides the gravity and the orientation of the vessel and the empty corridors.  
Nausea constricted his stomach as something deep under the flesh of his arm squirmed against bone and tourniquet. He reached an intersection in the passage and slipped, allowing himself to slide with the planet's gravity through an access corridor. He tried the turbolift at the end, but it did not recognise him, or was broken, so he was forced to continue on foot.  
After half an hour his entire arm burned and ached like a traumatic broken bone being squeezed too tightly. Adrenaline from unknown origin kept him on his feet even as the world spun and faded in and out of his sight in the poor lighting. His grip on his phaser was slipping as though his palms were sweating, but when he looked the hand holding the grip was smeared lightly with blood that he couldn't properly distinguish in the dark. He couldn't feel either of his hands properly and they shook with a rage he did not now feel. Or maybe a fear, which he might feel.

Kirk's back felt twisted, and he struggled to straighten out with no real concept of who or where he was. When his feet met a resistance he opened his eyes to discover he was in fact in a glass fume cupboard, one of several, in his black undershirt. Clearly he had been strip searched by someone who had afforded him enough dignity to dress him again, but not enough to turn his shirt the right way around before doing so. He wondered if he'd been awake for this and if he'd struggled. He hoped not, feeling that right now it was probably better that he had submitted graciously to whatever was going on that to have fought and lost. He still didn't know where he was or why he was tied hand and foot in a science lab. No one seemed to be observing him, in fact, no one was visible at all.  
His ear felt as though it were full of a hot clotted liquid, and he imagined he would have some other bruises, but there were no great injuries to his person that he knew of.  
For a mere second his head filled with blind panic. He swore he was cornered, he felt a terrible pain in one of his arms, he felt scared and out of control of himself. When the fear retracted to the back of his mind he checked the arm as best he could in the confines of the tank and with his wrists bound in front of him. It seemed fine. Nonetheless he felt oddly weak, as though he were recovering from a muscle relaxant or simply terrified. It stopped him from freeing his hands or kicking out the screen that trapped him, because when he tried he lacked the motor skills and his bare feet slapped the glass loudly and to little effect.  
Nervous of attracting attention to himself, he curled back against one side of the fume cupboard and prepared to wait.

Uhura willed Scotty to give up his command to her, but she didn't ask and he didn't give. Because the loss of contact had been foreseeable and Spock had entered the Lamark intentionally, regulations told them to wait a minimum of four hours before sending a party to bring him back, provided there was no reason to believe he had come to any harm. She resented that her first reaction to hearing that he had essentially married someone else was an unbearable desire to see him. She needed his explanation, for him to tell her things were alright. That he loved her and Kirk was just a solution to a problem. She wasn't naïve enough to believe it, but she was desperate enough, and right now it was probably a good thing Scotty was in command, because she'd be there with him before he'd even had a chance to go in if she could.  
McCoy flinched as she punched the punching bag in one of the gymnasiums, as though the blow had gone straight through it and into his cheek where he stood, several metres behind, watching her.  
"I don't need a doctor here to look after me." She said, more forcefully than McCoy deserved, but not as forcefully as she wanted to.  
He ignored he anger, knowing that it wasn't really directed at him. "What about a friend?"  
She didn't respond; she'd never really thought of him as a particularly good friend, but she didn't want to be alone with her thoughts and he was the only one on offer.  
When the silence became too drawn out, he left briefly and came back with something that tasted like whiskey, but with a suspiciously syntheholic after taste. Just like McCoy to be looking out for the hangover before she'd even taken a sip. She gulped it down anyway, waiting for the warmth and the familiar buzz.  
"Since when did you become everybody's mother?" She asked.  
He looked tiredly into his own drink, lips a little tighter than usual, the bags around his eyes a little tighter. "Since I got on that shuttle and sat next to Jim. This place is full of orphans looking for someone to give them limits. It's my job to provide." He drank deeply and set down his empty glass on the edge of the biobed she occupied.  
"Everyone except Spock," she said, thinking of how much he regulated his own behaviour. How intentional his every move was.  
"Even Spock." McCoy sighed. His look was pointed, and she wasn't sure if she was supposed to feel better or worse for this, but fortunately the synthenol was preventing her from feeling much of anything.

Spock would have done anything at that moment for either synthenol or a mother, preferably his own. The emotions raging in him were very much real, very not a product of psychology; rather a release of chemicals into his system.  
He had established a policy of checking every room he went into for signs of Jim, and had entered the transporter room expecting the same emptiness that had greeted him elsewhere. Surprised red eyes blinked back at him as the door slid open, and for a minute he and the infected man in the blue uniform simply stared at each other. He made no move to bite Spock, so must have been able to sense that he was already a host.  
Then a phaser jabbed into his back like a hypo and he realised he was surrounded by an enemy far more used to the gravitational arrangements than he was.  
"Drop your weapon," the man in the transporter room said. He did so, and a woman reached down to take it. "Take our guest to the brig, and see to it that he is properly treated and introduced."  
He was taken quite roughly by a guard of four that emerged from nowhere to the holding cell, confused by what he had just seen.  
As soon as he was inside the forcefield was raised. He looked blankly at the woman who had taken his phaser, and who scowled at him on discovering it was set to kill.  
"Hello. I am Doctor Lark. You are now a captive of the Hosts and the Masters. You will be held here until you are ready to fulfil your duty, and then you will be released."  
Before he could ask any questions, she left, and the guards on the door ignored him.  
After a short while the forcefield dropped momentarily and alien he was unable to place in his dazed state entered. The red-eyed humanoid unpacked a medical kit and removed both the tourniquet and Spock's uniform shirt. Too confused to resist, he didn't, and just stood as the wound was cleaned and dressed, and several hypos injected into his neck. One was a painkiller.  
"There we are, that should speed things up." The doctor told him.  
Careful to control his intonation, he asked, "Speed what up? Who is are the Hosts and who are the Masters? What duty have I to perform? Where is Captain Kirk? Why am I being held in the brig? Why has your ship not responded to our communications? Why are you parked in such a manner? Why did you enter the atmosphere at all? To what purpose is your mission here and why is the artificial gravity still on?" Endless questions poured unbidden from him.  
The doctor's head shook. "We are the Hosts! You and I! Your duty is to the Masters and to the Followers, you must spread the glory of the Empire to those Followers who are as of yet not Hosts."  
"I will not." He protested, but he could already feel his resolve breaking. He sank to the floor because he couldn't find "up" and his knees were shaking with adrenaline.  
The doctor did not respond, and left him alone in the cell, awaiting his own morbid transformation, or maybe just the Pon Farr, to claim him.


	26. The Masters and the Hosts

Spock was fairing better this time around as the parasite's effects took hold, but not so well that he didn't panic at his trapped state when the drive to be outside overtook him. His vision was already turning red, and the light from the reaction in his eyes dazzled him slightly. The constant struggle to maintain a position in which he was upright according to both types of gravity was proving stomach-turningly difficult, and he had regurgitated his replicated plomeek soup onto the deck plates some time before. The soup also seemed to have issues establishing where "down" was, so in the end he lay as far as he could from it with his feet on the wall which seemed to be closest to the planet's gravitational pull.  
His thoughts flicked between his need for Kirk and the competing need to escape and spread his disease, between moments of agony and pure medicated bliss. His only thought for Nyota was the sudden, shameful realisation that he'd not thought about her at all since he got in here.  
Earlier he had run into the forcefield and bounced off it a few times, narrowly missing his spreading pool of vomit, and now it was edging closer to his position on the floor. He no longer cared enough to move away, almost insensible with pain and pleasure and a hundred different needs. It seemed as though he had been there forever, but the chronometer adjacent to his cell informed him he'd been gone from the ship just 1 hour and 46.2 minutes.  
The doctor had come back once already to search him, and now returned a second time to reassess. The infected alien seemed surprised at the results on the medical scanner, as though Spock had progressed faster than expected. It could have been something to do with his having being infected before, but Spock hoped that it was a mistake based on the doctor not knowing the progression of the parasite within a Vulcan. Indeed, these humans seemed to be far more in control than he was, despite their blood red eyes and hypersalivating mouths.  
"How... Is it that you are so controlled and others with the parasite are not?" He managed to grit out, his voice strained and shaking.  
The doctor looked critically at him and rolled him out of the spreading sick. "After the Masters have fulfilled their breeding potential, they put us to other uses. They allow us back our normal functions so that we may spread our faith. In a month's time you will achieve the same glory. For now, though, you are free to go. You will very soon be ready."  
Spock felt ill-equipped to appreciate his coming glory as he was dragged to the transporter room and made to stand on the pad.  
"But I must find Jim!" He told them, as though his desires counted for something. "I must have my Captain back."  
The man with the surprised red eyes from earlier ignored him and fiddled the controls. "You will have him back, we will give him the blessing. But we need him here, and you are ready now to spread the Masters and you will not return until you have done so."  
His actions were illogical, but Spock was past caring. He wrenched his arm from the guard's grip and fled the room, scrambling up the corridor as the officers tripped after him. His gamble paid off; their parasites prevented them from shooting him and risking the safety of the one he hosted. Warning shots bounced off the walls, but within seconds he was out of sight and falling down a corridor as they slid behind him. The adrenaline from the parasite made his heart pound in his side and he sped off into the bowels of the ship.  
He slipped into an area of deep shadow to catch his breath and his pursuers ran on ahead of him. The little hairs on his skin prickled with fear worked into terror by the chemicals in his blood. He held off his ragged gasps until they were out of ear shot and then retched again, choking on bile. The burn of it in his windpipe reminded him why he had escaped in the first place, he had to find Jim. He hoped Jim had not been bitten yet, because telling himself that he could bite somebody if he found his captain was the only thing preventing him from walking back to the transporter room of his own volition. Maybe if he did so and he asked for his communicator the Enterprise could beam him aboard and he could bite someone there. No. McCoy would rip it out of him a second time and he could not bare that.  
In the end, his compromised logic won out, and he began to wander the mostly empty ship again for signs of his human. He suspected that Jim was in fact bait for the crew and felt a tingle of joy that they would be able to share this with him when they beamed down in two hours to search for him.  
He immobilised a young scientist with a nerve pinch and stepped into Lab 1. The laboratory was bleakly lit with a repaired overhead light which leached colour from the room so effectively that it looked as though it were decorated in red and pink.  
He looked over the equipment, not really caring about it, but hoping some sort of clue would jump out of him from nowhere. It seemed the lab had not been in use for some time, dust had settled on the surfaces and coated delicate technologies.  
He got his wish; a screech from the adjoining lab that would have chilled his blood before he'd been infected. Now it only excited him and he hurried toward the sound, feet squeaking against the linoleum floors.  
There was a man strapped to a bed, so emaciated it took Spock a moment to identify his human origin. Patient Zero. His eyes were red and his skin grey and malnourished, dehydrated, he was foaming at the mouth. He had an empty IV going into one arm, and was immobilised from his ankles to a strap holding his head in place, but one his other arm had gotten free and he reached it out towards the Vulcan. The being within the animal that was now Spock fought for control, and he undid a strap even though doing so did not further his cause. He knew he ought to do some sort of emergency first aid on the obviously dying man, but he no longer had the will to help him at all.  
His intervention probably did not save the patient, as he had not even managed to sit up in the time it took Spock to explore the room and decide on his next course of action.  
Spock blinked and was somewhere else. He did not remember getting there, but he had, and he was still undetected. He was in an engineering room, probably an auxiliary one. It was dark. He walked away and appeared again, somewhere else, with no recollection of the journey. Foam dribbled down his own chin now, and he did not wipe it away. He was in a sickbay full of more strapped down patients he hadn't the time to save, some of whom were already fragrant with death, others mad with fear and desperation. No one was there tending to them to stop him. He was in an abandoned communal mess. Old food that had been left in a hurry rotted at the tables, coats were still slung over chairs.  
Behind him he heard footsteps and he turned to the red glint of a security officer's eyes. Her phaser was pointed at his chest, and he backed away until his shoulders slammed into the replicator on the wall.  
And then he was in a storage compartment, alone. He didn't know where the woman had gone, but there was blood under his nails. He exited the tiny room and came face to face with the sign for Lab 4.

As time wore on, Kirk found he could feel more and more of Spock's emotions. Something was wrong, his carefully implemented shields were being lowered, and the behaviour he could now detect was erratic and impulsive. Fear; a need to run; bloodlust and anger and violence. A desire for him. Jim strained to keep his own actions under control, but there was nowhere to run and nothing to lash out at. The room was almost too dark for his eyes to focus, and the only stimulation to keep him awake beyond his own anxiety was the surge of emotion from Spock. He wanted Spock, and he wanted himself, to bite himself. The thought was enough to tell him what had happened to compromise his first officer.  
Suddenly he heard a door open, and the work lights came on, blindingly bright after hours in the dark.  
The red eyes of one of his captors flashed at him dangerously as the figure approached. He recognised Spock with a jolt of fear, not trusting him because Spock did not trust himself. Kirk found his shoulders pressing up against the far wall of the tank as Spock moved through the laboratory and past the other fume cupboards towards him, mouth open and gathering speed. Spock slammed into the glass and it cracked under his body weight. Foam from his mouth sprayed it, milky with tiny eggs. He hit the glass again and it gave beneath him, causing Spock and a thousand little squares of safety glass to land on Jim hard enough to wind him.  
A siren sounded and a red light flashed, making the Vulcan's eyes appear normal for a single frame of Kirk's vision, before Spock bolted at the sound of the alarm, smacking himself on the door as he flew out of it.  
Jim sat, dazed and surrounded by glass, unable to move for his own restraints. When no one came after several long minutes, he felt the mess of emotion and adrenaline strengthening in his head, and heard Spock's footfalls returning. He stood in front of Jim with unfocused eyes, and Kirk could feel the internal war between Spock's need to protect his captain and his need to bite him.


	27. Kissing in the Fume Cupboard

It was not his neck Spock caught as he leant down.  
The kiss was rough and unexpected, and Kirk almost flinched back from Spock's mouth. His First Officer tasted faintly of vomit and salty parasitic eggs, and his lips were dry and cracked. Spock gripped his face tightly, digging glass into his cheek until it pierced his palm and Jim's skin at the same time. Jim didn't care, the desperation sank in through the fingers on his scalp and he hoped that relief made it back to Spock. The foaming saliva felt unpleasantly wet although Spock's tongue itself was dry. Kirk spat to his side when the kiss broke.  
His resistance broke with it, so he allowed Spock's needy lips to trace their way to the mostly healed bite, where his neck joined his shoulder, teeth grazing his skin. A wave of pleasure passed through Spock and into him when they sank into the flesh.  
It wasn't enough, and the Vulcan peppered the skin of his neck and collar bone with tiny bites that just broke the skin. There was a sensual aspect to it, Jim knew, but he couldn't tell if it was the work of the parasite or the fact that it was him, or maybe the bond between them. He did not think now was the right time to tell Spock that since both of them had been injected with a drug that inhibited the hatching of the eggs in their blood and spittle, a mixture of which had been smeared by Spock's mouth over his neck and chest, making his black undershirt sticky.  
He pushed the science officer away before he could pick up on the thought, and Spock evidently let him, as there was little chance of him being able to force even a half Vulcan to move if he didn't want to.  
The contact broken, the pain of the bites shocked him and he sat still, blinking at the equally motionless commander. He had no idea what had possessed him to allow that to happen, and knew they needed to get out of here. It was a miracle, or a trick at least, that they had not been intercepted yet, especially with the alarm and the red light flashing overhead.  
"Let's get out of here." He said, gesturing toward the door. Spock looked frightened, his eyebrows a little closer together and the red eyes a little wider.  
"We must not go back to the ship," he insisted, earnestly. "McCoy will take the Masters from us."  
Jim made sure they weren't touching as he formulated his lie. The Master had to be either parasites or whoever had sent them. He decided to keep his response ambiguous. "We have. I will order McCoy to infect everyone on the ship, and none of them will want to be cured. I need you to untie my hand and feet."

Spock lacked the necessary fine motor skills to untie the bonds, but retained enough to use a scalpel abandoned on a counter top nearby. There was a dried yellow stain on it, and he tried not to think what it might be as he shook cutting Jim's feet loose. He should have done the hands first and let the human do his own feet, but he'd also been bereft of foresight.  
Spock knew intellectually that he was being lied to, and it wasn't a very convincing lie. But he was overcome by his need to reconcile being close to Jim and to infect new people, and he chose to believe it. In any case, part of him could not believe that Jim would condemn him to the loss of the Master.  
Jim dragged him, sliding through spinning hallways, to the place he believed he had cut the door into the hull.  
He did not remember any complications or altercations, but by the time they reached the hole Jim's nose was bleeding freely, and he exclaimed, "Thank god, I thought we were gonna have to go back on ourselves a third time."  
Spock felt himself go slack as they passed into the stifling heat.

Jim materialised in the transporter room of the Enterprise with Spock pressed against his chest and his hands around the Vulcan's waist. When he looked up for the medical team, his gaze was met by Uhura's stare. She looked as angry as she did sad, and he was gripped with guilt as he handed Spock over to Bones' ministrations.  
The blood had clotted in and around his mouth and chin, and his face was cut from glass. He had no idea what his neck looked like.  
Spock cried out, awaking again in McCoy's grip. He turned to Kirk for help that he knew he wouldn't receive. Jim was certain the Vulcan was appealing more to his position than him as a person, but it seemed to be the last straw for Uhura who wheeled and left without a word.  
For some reason he also felt guilty for Spock. He wondered if the Vulcan had noticed her leaving, but he seemed so distressed now that it seemed unlikely that he'd noticed her at all.  
Bones held Spock's head back firmly by the forehead and gave him hypo after hypo, a junior doctor sitting on his legs and being kicked mercilessly.  
Spock made no more noises beyond his initial shout, but scrabbled desperately at McCoy's shirt as the sedatives took effect.  
Eventually he was still enough to get loaded onto a stretcher, and Bones turned to Jim as he was loaded on. "Get him prepped," he yelled at a nurse. "You're coming to sickbay. That nose looks brok- Jesus Christ!" McCoy's eyes landed on his throat.  
Jim looked down as though he would be able to see it. The was only one bite in his line of sight, marked by a damp patch on his shirt.  
"Is it that bad?"  
"That bad? You're a mess!" Bones shook his head. His expression was pained and he missed a beat as he led the way out the door, checking Spock was out the way. "Jim, I... Think I did something..."  
"You think you did what?" His tongue felt thick and his voice was nasal. "What, Bones?"  
He walked into the doctor when he stopped again in the doorway. He tried to protect his nose, but smudged McCoy's uniform with snotty blood. Bones was clearly too worried to be disgusted.  
"I think I told Uhura that it was you Spock fucked in the Pon Farr."  
Jim only blinked at him, until the CMO felt too uncomfortable to stay still and finally continued out of the sliding door. "She didn't know?"  
"I don't think she wanted to know. Or maybe Spock just didn't tell her." He flapped his hands. "I dunno. She was really torn up... I thought she knew, she indicated she did. Spock's gonna flip..."  
The conversation was cut short when they reached sickbay, but he couldn't help but wonder what that meant for him and Spock. His own selfishness made him feel worse than the broken nose.  
Spock would never forgive either of them if he lost Uhura. The anxiety was bitter in his mouth.


	28. Addict

There was a feeling of unease about the ship, Chekov noted. He sat at his post, navigating to nowhere, eating a strange fruit that he'd replicated on his break out of either curiosity or boredom. Sulu didn't feign interest this time, as he sometimes did, but smiled a little anxiously at him. The bridge seemed too solemn given the recent return of its captain and first officer, and the arrival of the USS Curiosity as medical back up. He supposed they might be mourning the loss of the other officers. Pavel only really knew Mehta, and not very well, and felt no reason to believe he was anything worse than infected.  
The bridge was empty of its usual officers with the exception of himself and Sulu; Spock was in sickbay, the Captain confined to quarters to recover from his minor head injury and countless scrapes and bruises, and Uhura was for some reason absent. He wondered if their disappearence meant they expected that Spock might die, but dismissed it; Hayves had been convalescing on a steady drip of morphine for the last five days.  
He jumped up from his careful dissection of the purple fruit when Sulu clapped a hand to his shoulder.  
"Want to come watch a movie in my quarters after shift?" He asked. He looked hopeful, as if Pavel might refuse.  
Really Chekov was pleased for any interaction with Hikaru, or anyone at all in a non-work context. His youth always hit hardest during recreation. "It would be my pleasure, sir," He responded too quickly, regretting his choice of words. He turned back to his console, trying to look casual.  
Sulu laughed at him. "Alright, should we skip dinner? I have a replicator in my room, so..."  
Casual failed him and he blushed at the thought of being alone in Sulu's room. His own were shared quarters, but it had only just occurred to him that Sulu's must not be. There were perks in being a Lieutenant.  
"Okay."

McCoy was relieved to have Spock under heavy sedation and on a biobed where he could keep him under his gaze at all times. No one ever listened to him when he told them to beam straight up. This was all getting ridiculous, and he never intended to perform surgery on someone's brain via their internal jugular vein again if it killed him. Still, he couldn't bring himself to disassemble that pretty and extremely strong skull for better access, and the surgery had gone fine even if it had taken over two hours.  
As Chief Medical Officer he was allowed to stop anyone else from going down onto the surface, but he doubted it was worth the fight with Jim with an epidemic and five missing members of the security team.  
And there were enough internal problems to cause fights already. Neither Jim nor Uhura had come to visit Spock in the nine hours since he had come out of surgery. This was another reason for Bones to keep him asleep longer. That and the pixelated saliva that he'd rinsed from the Vulcan's mouth countless times, carrying hundreds of tiny unhatched eggs.  
Spock looked weak and thin, his face bruised and with a hint of stubble, and his eyes were unusually sunk back in his head, as though he were wearing sickly gothic make up. Tubes of antibiotics and morphenolog ran up his intact arm. The other was recovering with the recent help of the dermal regenerator, the bite too messy and irregular to attempt to close it any other way. Rarely had Spock looked so ill. He was largely out of danger, and he wasn't in Pon Farr that Bones could tell, but he wouldn't want to speculate on whether the Vulcan would be able to survive another round of either his own mating cycle or exposure to the parasite. He'd run the regenerator over the scars later, but he felt fare more helpless in undoing his own mistake. He hoped Uhura would see sense before Spock realised what had happened.

Spock's dreams took on a profoundly more unsettling nature under the influence of morphenolog. It filled the gap where the comfort of the parasite used to be, but as he came round from the anaesthesia into a lighter opiate haze, his mind forced him to confront problems better addressed by meditation. He watched Jim die several times, the shock of the hot tears on his face, his fists pummelling Khan. He watched him wake up.  
The first time Uhura kissed him was on their first date. It was his first kiss of any kind. His mother had kissed him, but he had never kissed her back that he could remember and his father was never anything more than companionable. He had never had any other kind of relationship where a human kiss was necessitated before, and it took him by surprise, though not an unpleasant one. That he'd liked it was perhaps the most surprising thing of all.  
The memory of his mouth on Jim's the day before felt like betrayal, and in his dream the hurt of it killed her.  
He woke up suddenly, the pain and confusion following him. He found his arms trailing tubes, a machine beeping incessantly behind him and himself confined to the bed by a catheter.  
He felt very vaguely that something important had been taken from him, and he twisted painfully to look around the sickbay to find it.  
McCoy somehow noticed his distress from the other room and came through.  
"Spock, it's alright. You're safe now." The doctor pushed his chest gently but he refused to lie back down.  
"Where is Jim?" He demanded, finding his voice. He could not remember their return to the ship, and he had no idea whether Jim had made it or not.  
"He's a lot better off than you. Now lie back down or I'll sedate you."  
He let himself be pushed back onto the bed, but felt the odd sting of the hypospray in his shoulder anyway. Extra morphenolog.  
"You're in withdrawal," Bones told him, "And you're recovering from an improvised brain surgery courtesy of yours truly."  
That didn't sound encouraging, but Spock didn't care. The opiates were all he needed. The opiates and Jim.  
He didn't have time to check the thought before his brain became the disordered, drug-induced cinema it had been before.


	29. A Very Human Problem

Kirk launched into his work as though his life depended on it. He had not sent anyone from his own ship down to the surface since his own return six days ago, with the exception of the medical teams he didn't dare withdraw from Colony 2.  
He knew he ought to have confronted Spock, who was due to be confined to quarters from about 14.00 that afternoon for another two weeks, but it was too much for him to attempt to deal with alongside the epidemic and the growing evidence of Section 31's involvement.  
It was unclear whether they had intended to release the parasite on Tau Ceti IV or not, but from Spock's reports he guessed the latter. Theologically the parasite was interesting, almost a literal enactment of the many theories of humankind creating its own gods. Indeed, Hayves had eventually been transferred to the brig, because there was simply no other way to keep her on the ship. She knew, objectively, what had happened to her, but like any addict, nothing could come between her and her fix. The empath was, it turned out, an expert in manipulation, to McCoy's cost, and more recently that of the ensign in the transporter room, who was now taking more sedatives than she was. At least McCoy seemed to be dealing better with the memories of his own emergency surgery. Jim was both relieved and a little guilty that he hadn't been there.  
The Curiosity had set up a better compound for treating the now 1,400 people who had had the parasite removed and the 750 left to go. They were now equipped to treat people with advanced stages of the disease, and the greatest focus was on the hundreds of brain surgeries to perform, addictions to treat, and free infected people to lure, a dangerous endeavour that involved a Scooby-Doo like strategy of human bait. The only difference was that in the old Earth cartoon, the bait never got caught; the same could not be said for several of the volunteers.  
Jim was more concerned with having to discuss this with Command. Something had to be done before Section 31 turned into another CIA. Using 72 people as weapons followed less than two years later with killing a minimum of 350 people, and counting, who died of exposure or dehydration, in an attempt to design a biological weapon. The ion storm bothered him the most; he could see no reason for anyone to transport that much material to the planet and release it, unless it was an intentional cover up of the virus. He'd order an investigation whether Command asked him to or not, the moment Spock was well enough to give more information. It might mean sending down his entire security team in order to secure the Lamark and find out what the hell was going on. It had occurred to him that Spock had responded to his suggestion of how the spread the parasite to the ship when under its influence, and he wondered if the parasite was designed to control and not to kill.  
He slumped, exhausted in his chair on the bridge, ignoring refreshments that were no replacement for sleep. He would have asked Uhura to relieve him, but the odd silence between them had persisted, so he made Scotty come up from Engineering to sit in his chair instead, before he collapsed in his bed in the Captain's Ready Room. For the last three days he'd slept here and not in his quarters and the place was dishevelled and needed airing, which was of course impossible.

Spock had been back in his own quarters less than two hours before the door buzzed. He opened it without checking who it was, and Uhura stood on the other side of the threshold. He was not surprised to see her; it was only logical she seek him out in private, but his still stomach tried to roll without his permission. Her face was set with the same concentration she'd shown on many a difficult mission, but this was different. It took him only 4.1 seconds to figure out why, but he still did not know what to say.  
He said nothing, and neither did she, so he stepped aside for her to enter as hospitality demanded.  
When the silence pervaded into its second minute, he broke it. "I understand why you're angry with me," He began.  
"I'm not angry!" She cut him off with a passion that he thought contradicted her words. "I'm hurt."  
This was worse, he felt. He would have faced her anger a several times over to avoid the inflection in her voice. Before he could apologise she raised he hands and he thought she was going to hit him, but they merely flailed uselessly to her sides. He had felt frustration, and knew how his body wanted to act on it, but even with the past few years spent in human company he still had to search for the links as though he were matching them to an image in a text book. Nyota was frustrated with him.  
"You know," Her voice held a note of bitterness. "I always told myself I'd never let myself get this way over a man. There's this stupid hollow idea that a woman always needs a man to complete her, and I swore I'd never let myself feel that way. I'm a fucking person Spock."  
He wanted to tell her he knew this, and that he had always found her to be quite intact, but stopped himself.  
"A healer may sever the bond formed between myself and Jim, I-"  
"No." She said firmly.  
"Why?" He had to ask.  
She shook her head and laughed, looking away. Her apparent happiness confused him for a moment before it evaporated.  
"Because look at you. Look at him!"  
"Please be assured that the...mating and our appearances bear no correlation."  
Uhura ignored him. "You know, I think he's the only person you ever respected without it being out of politeness. The only person who ever really had to earn that from you. He fucking..." She hesitated. "He fucking completes you." She grinned as though it were funny, but he was not amused and he did not believe she was either. "What other team could you work on?" The words were spat with too much anger for it to be an admission of defeat, and Spock was thankful, because the idea of putting the two people he loved up against each other was too much. He flinched at the association of the word love with Jim more than at Uhura's words.  
"But..." He thought for a moment, not sure if he was saying what needed to be said or if he was just being manipulative. "I love you, Nyota."  
"I know," she said quietly. Then she pursed her lips. "But can you honestly tell me you don't love him?"  
He opened his mouth to respond, then realised he had nothing to say and shut it. His love for Jim was definitely different to his love for her, but a lifetime of denying the validity of emotion made it impossible to tell exactly where the differences lay.  
Eventually he knew his silence had been enough. "What do you want us to do?" He wanted to cover his ears to shield himself from the answer.  
She let him worry for a while, picking her words carefully and then abandoning them several times. "I don't know."  
She touched his elbow in a way that disarmed him; familiar, but ambiguous, and not unlike the way that Kirk would touch him before the Pon Farr. She left him with more questions than answers, and the sensation that she was taking a part of him away with her.  
He sat on the edge of his bed, in control of his emotions but not feeling like meditation. Too human a problem with too human an answer.  
He didn't sleep, but lay awake thinking things through in a way he presumed a human must when something troubled them.


	30. Liar Liar

When Spock returned to work Jim had begun the surprisingly easy task of avoiding him. He sent a request to his PADD for him to help in the investigation, and had him working reduced hours in the science labs, or on the bridge on different shifts to himself.  
He busied himself with his own duties, filing report after report, carefully implying the involvement of Section 31 without stating it directly, and avoiding anything that might suggest that Spock or Hayves would be left permanently unfit for service by framing their recoveries in the most positive lights possible without actually seeing either of them in person.  
He had the far less gratifying task of informing the crew that one of the members of the security team, Ensign Claire Staldt, who had space-jumped with him into the ion storm the second time had been found dead yesterday, having wondered too far south and died of heat stroke as confirmed by the autopsy. Worse was composing that morning's dispatch to her parents. Two of Kirk's earliest missions had been incredibly violent and high casualty. He had addressed their parents and partners and children at Federation mass funerals, tearful, but impersonal, when they were already aware of their relatives' deaths. Thus far, however, he'd had yet to lose a crew member during the five year mission, and therefore had never actually had to be the one to inform a family of their loss.  
He had sent them a solemn, apologetic and grateful message, listing off the various achievements of the young woman. She had been 23, and when he cried alone in the ready room afterwards, he'd cried as much for her parents' sakes as for her, who he'd known by surname only. He would bring her ashes home personally, he said. The guilt was crushing.  
Jim felt old. He wanted to be swearing and drinking and pissing off Spock with McCoy, but somehow it seemed like this had all been taken away by the last two and a half weeks. Still, he could claim a little bit of that back now.  
He returned to his quarters, mainly because the ready room's replicator didn't do alcohol, or even synthehol, and he called McCoy in with him.  
"Let's get wasted." He said as soon as Bones buzzed at the door.  
"Finally," McCoy held out a bottle he had brought. Jim was clearly more predictable than he liked to think, but right now he wasn't about to start complaining about access to Bone's precious real whiskey.  
He shoved aside his carefully set up chess set in favour of replicator pizza and watching a holo movie instead. Fuck academic pursuits, he wanted to pretend for an evening that he was still a student cheating his way through the Kobayashi Maru.

Twice as intelligent, half as wise, Spock thought to himself as he sat in his seat on the bridge. It was not a Vulcan saying, although its true origin escaped him, but it seemed to describe his current situation adequately. He felt, for all of his intelligence and mental order, completely unprepared to deal with matters of interpersonal relationships. Vulcan wisdom was learned by rote as much as by experience, and it occurred to him that Chekov, who sat three metres away at the navigation console, setting their course for Earth, was probably better equipped to provide relationship advice than his father. This despite the fact that Chekov crushed hopelessly on anyone who he found attractive or simply kind, whereas his father had maintained a marriage of 28 years which had been ended by death and not divorce. Perhaps that was why a Vulcan could not aide him; their relationships were too simple. Too logical.  
"Sir?" Chekov caught him staring and blushed. Sulu gave Spock a guarded glance.  
"I noted your absence from the mess last night," He covered himself. "If you have lost appetite you ought to report to sickbay."  
Chekov blushed more and checked monitors that did not need checking. How illogical embarrassment made a human. "S-sir, I was, I, I ate in Lieutenant Sulu's quarters, sir."  
He raised an eyebrow to indicate he expected further explanation, but the Ensign offered none. Even Pavel Chekov was managing his relationships better than Spock. If Vulcans sighed he would have done so, but feeling inferior to Chekov was illogical.  
"Ready for warp, Commander." Sulu said.  
He checked in with Scotty, and then with Jim, and once they confirmed, he ordered Warp 6.  
"Elewen point four days until we reach our destination, sir." Chekov was clearly relieved that the subject had changed, so he abandoned his line of enquiry and withdrew into thoughts of Nyota and Jim. And morphenolog, which he had refused to take since the day before, annoyed at the way its continued hold undermined his mental discipline. He suppressed the physical symptoms of withdrawal easily, but found his irritability harder the check, and the need for opiates akin to a need for food or water. Mercifully in all other aspects, even those of concern and which might have distressed a human, he was as calm and serene as always. What is, is. He told himself, cool reason the perfect counter for the passion inducing twist of emotions he had felt facing Nyota.  
"Lieutenant Uhura, please take the conn." He said, with no inflection. "I would like to see what the laboratory has discovered about the Draconian mould." All research on the parasite had been transferred to the surface of Tau Ceti IV; Jim hadn't trusted Hayves to stay away from it otherwise. Mould and oxygen efficiency were now his main areas of study.  
Nyota looked at him curiously as he departed the seat, and he avoided the eye contact tactfully, heading for the turbolift.  
He blinked in confusion when the door opened and he found it already occupied. "Captain," he said respectfully, intending to exchange places with him as he presumed Jim wanted.  
Kirk's blue eyes lit up at the sight of him, shaking him off his balance. "Spock, just the man I was looking for!" The joviality of his captain after days of indifference set him a little on edge, and he jumped when Jim clapped a hand to his shoulder and wheeled him into the turbolift beside him. "You're coming to mine. You play chess?"  
"Captain, I remind you that I am on duty, I need to attend to several experiments currently-"  
Kirk swayed towards him, using his shoulder for balance. "I changed your rota." His breath on Spock's face was hot and smelled strongly of alcohol, but Spock no longer had any excuse to do anything but follow him to his quarters. "Do you then?"  
"Do I what?" He replied with professional agitation.  
"Play chess?"  
"I do." Spock wondered whether he was being taken into the room and sat down amongst the mess for the purpose of hearing bad news, but did not allow himself to worry about it.  
"Cool!" Jim said to the room, leaving Spock to decide if his enthusiasm was mere affectation. Nonetheless, his inebriated captain managed to carry the chess board to the table without knocking down any of the carefully laid out pieces. On later inspection, they would prove to be magnetic.  
"Want any food?" Jim stood in front of the replicator punching in the code for pizza. The buttons that coded for it were particularly worn out.  
He was about to decline but decided he would rather have something to look down at should the conversation test him. "I will have an apple."  
Kirk returned with his pizza and a perfectly formed apple from the machine. Spock stared at the fruit in his outstretched hand. "Have you any cutlery?" He took it by the stalk and set it on the table next to the chess board.  
Jim was drunk and culturally insensitive, and the look he returned was gormless. "You want a knife an' fork for an apple?"  
Spock knew humans liked to touch their food, as Kirk had already demonstrated with both his apple and the pizza, but he did not understand why he would be denied utensils. "If it is possible."  
Jim blinked at him and then slowly reached out for a drawer and placed a knife, fork and plate in front of him, as though it were a great effort. "Do you need a spoon as well?"  
"This should be adequate." He responded flatly, not rising to the obvious teasing.  
When Kirk's laughter didn't falter, Spock took white despite it being on the far side and went first, trying to redirect the Captain's attention. He moved a pawn to free his rook and hoped his demeanour conveyed expectation, but realised that it only seemed to be raising the tension in the room.  
"So," the human moved his knight first, a bold move which could have been strategy or alcohol. "How's the experiment coming along?"  
The Science Officer knew Kirk had no idea what the current experiments were, so he simply picked out his personal favourite. "The organism from Sigma Draconis III is growing well under laboratory conditions. It is a fascinating species that resembles an Earth slime mould. I speculate that it is similar to the first multi-cellular organisms to evolve on the planet. It has a quite unique evolutionary history as the planet has no deep oceans or even seas, but a remarkably even surface which is mostly shallow water, mud and rock. The species itself has many things in common with the slime mould – it can live as an individual single celled organism, but a colony can form together in a "slug like" arrangement to move toward more favourable conditions, and in a large enough colony some cells will specialise to act as sexual organs, sending up structures to release spores." He took Kirk's knight and two pawns. Kirk took only one of his, and waited for him to stop speaking.  
Instead of concurring with his interest in the Draconian slime mould he caught Spock's eye. "Enough, I wanna talk about you." His speech was slurred but less so than before.  
"What do you wish to know, Captain?" He said politely, taking a rook.  
Kirk groaned. "Jim. Jesus can you even have a personal conversation? If you would rather be working fine, go, but otherwise my name is Jim."  
Spock stayed in his seat. "What do you wish to know, Jim?"  
Jim's mouth turned up at the corners and he made yet another careless move. It cost him a pawn. "How come you joined Starfleet and not the Vulcan Science Academy? You got a place there, and even here your specialism is in science."  
The Vulcan found himself pleasantly surprised by the question. He thought for a moment until he could devise the most concise and least revealing answer. "The Academy was of the belief that my dual heritage put me at a disadvantage." His voice was neutral.  
"Fascinating," Kirk replied in a manner that told him that he was both the subject of a joke and also of an investigation. "You chose to defend the human side of you which you spend so much of your time resisting." His voice held no animosity, but genuine curiosity. If it had been anyone else Spock might have been annoyed by the way in which his short comment had been reverse engineered into the original thought.  
His mind flicked to his mother. "Yes, I suppose I did." He moved his queen out of danger via Kirk's bishop, and focused on slicing a small mouthful from his apple. It rolled frustratingly on his plate and he was forced to steady it with his fingers before he could pierce it with the fork. Jim watched, his eyes burning into Spock's chest.  
"Your turn," Kirk said. Spock looked at the bishop he had just taken. "To ask a question."  
A thousand questions competed for space, each more important than the next. Somehow in the confusion the winner slipped out unchecked. "Is this a date?"  
He felt his ears colour at Jim's laughter. "Do you want it to be?"  
It was not a response, but it seemed to be Kirk's next question. Silence being licence among humans, he forced himself to find an adequate response. "I do not know." He said at last. "I apologise. I have recently ceased use of morphenolog."  
Jim looked like he wanted to press but took the hint and let the issue drop. "How are you?"  
Spock recovered. "I am... Doing as well as can be expected. I will make a full recovery provided I do not come into contact with the pathogen again. Check."  
Jim moved his king out of harms way, his eyes fixed on Spock's. "I didn't just mean physically."  
The Vulcan moved his rook again, but didn't announce check. He squirmed almost imperceptibly in his seat, hoping his opponent's attention would be captured by the game.  
Unfortunately for Spock, Jim was playing to prolong their conversation, not to win. Their fingers brushed lightly as he moved the king onto the level below. Spock reminded himself that such a touch meant far less to a human than it did to him, but the thought did nothing to stem the desire for real, meaningful contact.  
His thoughts were broken by an accusatory finger pointed a few inches in front of his face, well within his personal space. "For a Vulcan, you're probably the biggest liar I've ever met."  
He stared at the finger as though it had been the one to insult him, and not Jim. "I beg your pardon?"  
Kirk huffed and took his hand out of range. "You're a liar. Almost pathological."  
"How so?" He kept his tone mild, but his withdrawal-weakened body flushed with irritation.  
"Every day you get out of bed and someone asks you how are and you lie. Every time someone asks what you're feeling, you lie. Even your vacant god damn expression is a lie!"  
"I have no reason to hide emotions I do not feel." Spock knew he sounded stubborn. Jim's exasperation was enough, and he stood, knocking down his king. "If you will excuse me, I have work to attend to."  
He thundered out of the room in a way that a human would judge to be slightly annoyed and a Vulcan deem an expression of emotion bordering on the shameful, and prowled to his station in the botany laboratory. A particularly illogical orchid looked at him impeachingly, and he glowered at it until an ensign took it away. At least his slime moulds didn't judge him.


	31. Drunken Communications

Jim wandered through the empty corridors of the Enterprise, avoiding stations like sickbay and the bridge that he knew were manned at all hours. The only people he passed were Lieutenant Arros and the young ensign assigned to security to cover Claire Staldt's unfortunately vacant position, who were on patrol.  
He stopped outside the communication's department, surprised to hear Uhura's voice coming through the door, which was half open because a young officer was standing too close.  
"I don't care if it didn't seem urgent, if it's an unusual transmission I expect to be informed! What I don't expect is for ensigns to be taking objective decisions on the part of the entire ship while their superior officers go about oblivious to important information!"  
The officer in the doorway cowered. "Sorry ma'am."  
"Sorry Lieutenant!" Uhura breathed dangerously.  
"Sorry Lieutenant!" The youth offered - too late.  
"You are dismissed for the remainder of this shift. Your pay will be docked for the equivalent time that you failed to report a transmission on an unused frequency, which is four days. You will report tomorrow as usual but you are one fuck up away from losing your job! Now get out!"  
The woman turned to leave. As soon as the door closed behind her she thumped into Kirk's chest, her eyes clouded with angry tears. "Sorry sir, I didn't see you there, sir." He turned around in the direction she was headed and walked with an exaggerated haste ahead of her, until he reached a turning, hoping it would lighten her up a little. Being her commanding officer didn't make it easy. She offered him a nervous smile when she turned to head towards her quarters, but he knew she'd spend the evening crying.  
He squashed any thoughts of both her and Spock, and thanked whatever deity happened to have afforded him the protection of being Uhura's superior. If she shouted at him like that when she wanted to, he'd be crying himself to sleep too. He decided in the interest of personal safety that it would be wise to crush his curiosity about the broadcast and rely on her telling him if it turned out to be important.  
The hangar deck was quiet and empty. It smelled functional, of grease and cooling fluids and food eaten on the job, comfortingly similar to the engineering department of the Starfleet Academy. The engineering bay of the ship smelled more of alcohol when he arrived; Scotty and a middle aged woman were asleep at their posts, and otherwise it was empty.  
As he surveyed the bay from the balcony, it occurred to Kirk that he was looking for Spock, expecting to find him sat up against a wall at every next turn. Somehow he remained convinced that he would find him somewhere, but be damned if Kirk was going to actually go to Spock's room.

As it happened, such an attempt would have been fruitless anyway.  
Spock jumped in alarm as the door to botany opened, almost dropping the petri dish he had been studying with no particular goal. He relaxed a little when his eyes found Jim, as though it was less of a slip in professionalism to have one's captain find you squatting inside an under-surface storage compartment than to be discovered by an ensign.  
The components of his communicator were laid out neatly on the floor in front of him, ordered into wires and nano-computer chips and transceivers and several other less specific collections.  
Jim walked over, unphased by the lack of any further acknowledgement. He took a small electron microscope out of the next doorless cupboard along and folded himself into its space next to Spock. He couldn't see the Vulcan's face, but he could see his hands and feet where they stuck out.  
"I wanted to apologise," He started. Spock bristled in his compartment as the companionable silence between himself and the slime mould in the petri dish was broken. The slime mould did not react.  
"I accept," He said. He did not say, you may go now. Accordingly, Jim did not leave, disappointing Spock when he didn't reject the blame being laid solely on his person. He snatched up the case for his communicator, intending to repair it and head straight to his own quarters, but Jim was already holding the magnet for the in-ear speaker. The Vulcan held his hand out, like a parent confiscating a banned item from a child.  
Kirk returned the magnet with the same deliberate sloth he had shown in providing cutlery four hours before. His fingers lingered unnecessarily against Spock's, sending static up his spine. The hand withdrew, brushing against his index finger as it did so, making Spock shudder. He hoped that it was subtle enough for Jim to have missed it.  
"Are you okay?" The Captain rephrased his earlier question, holding out that first nano-chip, which Spock had discovered as the source of the humming noise. It did not connect so close to the magnet, where it would be subject to electromagnetic interference. He connected it there anyway.  
Spock took his time answering, indulging an illogical desire to give Jim the impression that he did not intend to answer. When he did his voice was milder than his words. "Not really."  
Kirk's fingers ghosted against his wrist as he passed a thin wire. The hand stroked the bond between them as it touched Spock, but he doubted the human could feel it. "I'm sorry."  
"You have already apologised." The science officer told him, staring at the place where their skin had met.  
"I meant I'm sorry you're upset, not sorry I was being a dick about you earlier. Separate apologies." There was a chink and a wet swallowing. After a minute a flask was thrust round the wood that separated them.  
Spock accepted, not bothering to mention that Starfleet regulation #432.1 stipulated that no food or drink could be consumed in a laboratory, or that #1318.3 maintained that either the captain or the first officer should remain sober at all times, even when neither is on duty. He decided that it would be illogical to wipe the top given that he and Jim had endured far more physical contact than the sharing of a bottle, and swallowed deeply. The alcohol burned his tongue and throat and made him cough, but he kept drinking until the vacuum created within the flask demanded his lips be removed or suffer the consequence. He let their fingers stroke on purpose when he handed it back.  
"You should be careful with that," Jim told him. "Stuff's like, 60%. Bones keeps telling me it'll turn me blind." He shook the bottle to discover that Spock had consumed almost 200ml. "Jesus, you're gonna be wasted."  
"Unlikely. The Vulcan body contains up to five times the alcohol dehydrogenase of a human. Assuming my own physiology in such matters is approximately half way between the two values, I should have two to three times the alcohol resistance you possess." But Spock had to concede that he was feeling significantly lighter and a little giddy, if not blind.  
"You're still gonna be wasted." Jim swigged the last of the unpleasant beverage, his speech slurring gently. "Replicator's best alcohol hand sanitiser. Drink water before you go to bed."  
Spock supposed he should have known that the acrid liquid was not in fact intended for human consumption. He hoped the lapse in his mental performance was a normal result of alcohol and not a side effect of some unknown chemical.  
"You know," Kirk continued, "When I first met you, I thought you had your shit so together... Like, you were fucking here to like, fucking babysit me." Spock's brain automatically filtered out the references to coitus. "You had a professional fucking attitude about your whole frigging planet collapsing. Everything that would've made me go to shit, and you were just fucking fine. Never knew if I was meant to be you or break you." He coughed, his throat dried by the alcohol. "Hell if I ever thought I'd see the day when you were passed out on the floor and I was leaking your fucking cum from both ends. I s'pose I broke you then, didn't I?"  
The first officer knew the words were designed to extract an emotional response, but he surprised them both by laughing. It was an unnatural sound, scraping into the air like an animal's last breath. The hysteria was so complete that the historian within him warned with images of a 19th Century incarnation of Bones approaching him with a mechanical vibrator and a water spray. As it happened, McCoy only flapped about decreased liver function and gave him several detox hypos in an attempt to rectify the situation the following morning.  
"I suppose you did." The voice was even when it broke out between the shuddering laughter. "I do not believe I am qualified to babysit you, James Tiberius Kirk."  
His unusual behaviour had clearly alarmed both Kirk and the slime mould, which withdrew it's flattened disk-body into a small slug, on a slow motion mission for a more appropriate home. Kirk also seemed tense for a moment, but then sighed, his head thumping against the panel between them. "You're drunk."  
"Your assertion is correct. However, I believe the effects on myself will dissipate far sooner than your symptoms." He levelled, snapping the back of the communicator into place. Withdrawal and the beginnings of a hangover combined to form a throbbing headache, and he crawled out of the small space, seeing Kirk for the first time.  
The human's eyes were sunken and tired, with lines of stress crinkling the edges. He was flushed with inebriation and his hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. Spock set the petri dish down in the only empty slot on its holder, among nineteen others. Then he uncapped a bottle of distilled water meant for rinsing equipment and gulped it down in several large mouthfuls. He sat back down with his back to a unit housing a huge centrifuge, opposite Jim. Their feet could have touched if he had stretched his legs out.  
"Is this a date?" Kirk was too drunk to smile with any emphasis on mocking his first officer, so he flashed his teeth in a grin instead.  
"Do you want it to be?" Spock quoted back, but didn't dare catch his eye. He didn't have to, as Jim's head fell back, unconscious before it hit the wood of the unit, leaving Spock no less confused but far more intoxicated than before he had arrived.


	32. Mutiny on the To Kill List

Jim's head split with the sound of Uhura's voice practically booming into his room through the comms unit.

"Captain Kirk, I know you can hear me now get up and get your ass to the bridge! I've managed to decode a transmission from what looks like a ship on an asteroid we passed about half a light year back. You're gonna want to hear this!"

"Jeez, alright I'll be there." He replied over his earpiece. He could feel the throbbing of his own pulse as it pressed against the plastic. When he opened his eyes he was no longer on the floor of a botany lab, but in his own quarters, to which only Spock and McCoy had the entrance code. He was a little disappointed to find himself still dressed in yesterday's crinkled uniform. It was surprising how short a time it took for him to get over years of disparaging, disappointed glares and to get used to being desirable. He supposed it was the dream come true of the womanising asshole he'd been before he'd gained his captaincy. Lucky fucker. The irony of his softening morning wood being tucked against his belly for aman was not lost on him.

Not bothering to change or wash, although he most certainly was in need of grooming, he scrambled to the turbolift and walked out onto the bridge just as Sulu looked about to enter a panic attack from the mess of information being thrown across the deck.

"Taking her out of warp, Commander." He was spared the wrath of a female yeoman for calling an inanimate object "her" by the stress of the moment. Kirk secretly liked to tell himself that the Enterprise was indeed a woman, and that he was married only to her, but he suspected quite correctly that most of the women crew members might take issue with that fact.

Spock was in the command chair attempting to look at two PADDs and the main display at once whilst being talking to a member of security. He did not stand up when he saw Jim.

"What's going on?" He demanded, taking in Chekov's frightened face and the jittery ensign holding Spock's attention. "What happened?"

Instead of breaking out of his island of calm, Spock gestured to Uhura to fill Jim in and continued to look over some important document.

"I detected a broadcast on an unusual frequency that had been broadcasting for the past five days yesterday evening. They were on an asteroid but now they've disappeared from our sensors." She had clearly been up all night working on it. Various bits of information competed to escape her. "I decoded it and managed to translate it half an hour ago. It's a Section 31 vessel, they've been discussing our involvement on Tau Ceti and the release of the plague there. They've got kill orders for everyone on the Enterprise, the Curiosity and on the planet surface, sir."

The entire bridge save Spock seemed to hold its breath.

What Kirk had walked into was apparently a ship-wide mutiny with the consensus of everyone on board. It made him feel proud. They all waited on him to proceed, Spock vacating the command chair. Jim sat down in it stiffly and considered his options, which it seemed were few. He turned on the comm, making sure his voice was heard by the entire ship. "Well then everybody, I'm sure the rumour mill has already done my work for me, but it seems that with our little tryst on Tau Ceti we've made it onto the "to kill" list of Section 31, and we can either sit here and wait for them to come to us or we can go back and do our best to get out alive. Since we've got nothing to lose, I'm gonna suggest we all get down to the act of High Treason. All personnel to battle stations!"

Then he slammed red alert and the bridge sped into action as though someone had just pressed "play".

"Sulu, bring us about 180°, go back at Warp 8, Chekov plot the fastest course back to Tau Ceti IV, I'm willing to bet they're gonna be headed either for us or the colony and I don't wanna give 'em more notice than we have to. Uhura, stop all communications and broadcasts, I want this ship silent. Whatever power isn't going into the warp drive I want it on shields. Ready the phaser banks."

Spock regarded him with interest.

"What, you wanna just wait for them to come make us have an "accident"?" The adrenaline was making him giddy and sick with anticipation at the same time, but Spock was his usual not-relaxed, not-agitated self, navigating the worst-case scenario with a natural ease. He didn't even look hung over, and it was at times like these that Jim wondered why their positions were not reversed.

"On the contrary, Captain, I am no more eager to face death than yourself, especially at the hands of an unaccountable, rogue government organisation." He left something unsaid, but Kirk couldn't place it, and time did not allow for him to try. "At this speed we could reach Earth in less than two days and request amnesty with Starfleet. However I would concur with the conclusion you have doubtlessly made yourself, that Section 31 on Earth would have sent out another ship to deal with us themselves. This is the only logical course of action I can conceive of in which both the Enterprise and the residents of the colony have a chance of surviving."

"Where do you put the odds?" Kirk asked, noting that the phaser banks were now ready but not sure exactly what to do with Spock's complicity.

Spock himself seemed confused by the turn of phrase, waving away an ensign from the science department to concentrate on the matter at hand. "If by "where" you mean at what percentage, I calculate that if we manage to catch the ship unaware of our return and there is only one Section 31 vessel in the area, we have between a 27 and a 31.6 percent chance of both us and those on or orbiting the planet surviving, depending on the technology and arsenal of the enemy ship. If we lose the element of surprise I calculate the chances of success at 6.7 percent, or 14.4 percent for just the Enterprise surviving the initial attack, or 16.3 for the Enterprise being destroyed but the Curiosity and the colony surviving. If, however, they have rebuilt sufficiently since Khan's attack to have more than one ship in the vicinity, I-"

"Enough, hold it with the bad news already!" Jim cut him off, anxious enough as it was. Bones whisked his way onto the bridge with a scanner going over each member of the primary crew, hypos flying in reckless abandon. His eyebrow quirked when he had to give both Jim and Spock detox and liver function boosters, then Jim and Uhura both caffeine, and he ignored Jim's protests that caffeine should never be given in any form other than coffee. "You guys are a mess. If this wasn't an emergency I'd have the lot of you down in medical faster than you could even say coffee! I don't know what you've all been doing but dammit I'm a doctor, not a babysitter!"

He slapped Kirk's back hard enough to make the world roll in his dehydrated skull, before disappearing back into the turbolift to make checks on others at their battle stations.

"Ironic," Jim acknowledged out loud, mostly to himself. "How alive you feel when someone tells you you're about to die." The sound of the red alert made a familiar chill pass up his spine. It felt as though he were in the middle of a space jump, but the rushing in his ears was only his own blood, and the feeling of whizzing through space was from the stars passing by as they zoomed at Warp 8 back to the planet that Kirk had never wanted to see again only hours before.

No one took any notice apart from Spock who looked up from his position at Uhura's station, probably examining the transmission. "Illogical." He concluded.

Unlike Jim, Spock found it difficult to derive any enjoyment from their current predicament. He bumped into Uhura several times and it was all too easy to get caught up in her panic. He ached for the physical contact with her he had once denied himself so freely, and longed to feel her thoughts through his skin.

Mostly, though, there was the nagging sensation of wanting to go back to the planet, just for the slight possibility that he might be able to find a way to reinfect himself. As with all of his deepest desires, it was much easier to resist when the chances of obtaining it was slim. Now as they closed the light years closed between them the need stirred with a renewed passion.

It was time to find McCoy again, or really anyone who could procure for him morphenolog.

"Everything's fucked." Sulu thumped the armrest of his chair. Spock had to agree.


	33. Crash

It took less than five hours to reach the last known coordinates of the Section 31 vessel, and less than forty minutes to search the area and establish that it was no longer there. After this, Kirk had taken them down to yellow alert to allow the crew to rest for the two days it would take to close the distance to Tau Ceti IV. He wanted to put the Enterprise into warp 9, but didn't dare drain the extra power from the shields to do so. He was also tempted to send a warning ahead to the Curiosity, but knew that now the Enterprise had strayed off course and lost contact, any broadcast would be too suspect; any hidden message would be decoded immediately and the the ship's trajectory triangulated in the process. He couldn't risk it, especially as they were now only five hours from their destination. The crew was back on shifts, but he hadn't left the bridge or his ready room in the past two days, too anxious to return to quarters and mind racing too fast to sleep.

"Spock, what do you reckon will happen if we manage to deal with the Section 31 ship?" He asked.

Unusually, the First Officer did not respond. When he turned to look at the Vulcan, he was standing just to Jim's right as he had been for the past five minutes, but his eyes were closed and his face serene.

Now was not the time to be sleeping on the job. He jammed a finger hard into Spock's back and pushed. Spock recovered with just enough time to prevent himself falling face down on the deck plates. His neck snapped around to the source of his fall, and whilst his expression was as lacking as always, Kirk could feel the irritation hitting him in waves.

"Having a nice nap?" He asked, taking a PADD from an ensign and declining her request for reserve power to be diverted to botany.

"I was not "napping", as you say," a pulse twitched in Spock's jaw. "I was merely meditating on certain urgent matters."

Although it was Spock's default, the blank face reminded Jim of a defiant child refusing to be admonished. "Of course you were. Now if you don't mind, you don't get paid for day dreaming so get up and do something- we could get blasted out of the air any minute!"

Spock blinked slowly, ignoring the secret and utterly illogical hope that had settled in him; maybe Section 31 would capture and infect them, and he would get his parasite back.

"Captain, I sincerely doubt the chances of my remaining on payroll after this particular mission. The likelihood of us being "blasted out of the air" is extremely slim, as we are not within an atmosphere, and the implication would be that we would somehow fall down onto the surface of a planet or other body around which we are currently not orbiting." The unnecessary stream of words grounded him a little. He knew what Jim had meant, and Jim knew he knew so did not bother to qualify.

Eventually he gave up and walked briskly to look over Sulu and Chekov at their stations, as though he were likely to pick up on anything they hadn't. All he did pick up was that Chekov had an angry red blotch just peeking out of his collar. Spock homed in on this under the pretence of being useful.

"Mr Chekov," he said with what he hoped was concern, but really at this point could have been any emotion. His last dose of morphenolog had all but worn off. "You have some discolouration of the skin about your neck; it would be prudent to seek the aid of Doctor McCoy or Doctor M'Benga before we return to red alert."

The boy managed to look at him as though Spock had announced some obscure and perhaps distasteful fetish to the bridge in spite of his obvious anxiety about impending doom. He opened his mouth to respond, but only a small squeak came out before Spock's attention was drawn away by the sound of Uhura's voice. He would have to ensure Chekov sought medical attention later.

"Shit. I mean, Captain, I'm getting a distress signal. From the Curiosity, they're under attack from an unknown vessel!" She silenced the bridge with the tone of her voice. The sensors and machines were all extremely quiet beneath the sound of baited breath.

Kirk grit his teeth, the cogs working in his head visible to the entire deck. He sighed heavily, pressing a button on his own controls. "Battle stations everyone, we're on red alert. Scotty I want all auxiliary power diverted between the engines and the shields. Sulu. Go to Warp 9. Lower to Warp 7 when we're within 12 million kilometres of the planet."

"Aye sir," Sulu responded, pushing hard on the lever. They momentarily lost lighting and the shields were almost out, but returned when the ship was blasting past other star systems at what Spock believed to be approximately 1,630,000,000,000 kilometres per hour.

"Captain, the Curiosity has been hit. They are unable to retaliate, sir, all of their power is going in to maintaining their shields. I don't know if we're gonna make it on time, they seem-" Uhura smashed several buttons on her console, to what end no one else could tell. A small green light shone to her right. Spock was by her side in an instant.

"Lieutenant, stop broadcasting!" He ordered, reaching for the cut off.

She smacked his hand out of the way. "I'm not broadcasting! It's coming from elsewhere in the ship, I can't stop it from here." She shouted into her comm for someone to begin decoding the message.

"Can you shut it off from within the communications department?" Spock asked, a little too close to her face as she stood up.

"Maybe. I'd have a better chance of stopping it if I could find whoever is broadcasting. It's too late though, they'll have triangulated our location and probably our trajectory." She looked to the captain to confirm that she could leave, but he was occupied between Chekov and Sulu and a red warning light.

Spock made the executive decision and sat down in her chair before she could do anything. "Go Lieutenant. Report to me when you find whoever is sending the transmission and have communications report to me as soon as they have any of it decoded."

She was already in the turbolift, and so was Chekov.

Jim was shouting at Scotty through his comm, ordering him to find a way to restore the ship to Sulu's control.

"Ah cannae do that sir, they've overriden the controls on the main and auxiliary bridge! The best we can hope for is te be able te block their signal."

Spock was unable to compartmentalise all of the information coming at him. He bit hard on his lip because the pain allowed him to pretend that the relief that followed it when he was afflicted by the parasite would soon follow, and then he turned to Uhura's console.

/We can't hold them off much longer. Curiosity to any Federation vessel, we need help. We are being attacked, we are in orbit around Tau Ceti IV on a medical mission. We are being attacked. This is a distress signal. We can't hold them off any longer we have lost the main bridge! Repeat, we have lost the main bridge!/

A minute of explosions and shouting followed, before a deadly silence. He could do nothing but listen. After what felt like an hour, but in reality was less than thirty seconds, the frequency opened again.

/Curiosity to any Federation vessel. The attack has stopped. The enemy vessel is retreating. We are on auxiliary power and we have lost the main bri-/

The power shut off and the Enterprise dropped out of Warp 9 so suddenly that the bulkheads screeched under the tension and the entire crew was hurled forwards with as they slowed from light speed to 0.93 light speed – a loss of 20 million metres a second- in less than one minute. A vehicle at warp 9 had no greater velocity than one at warp 1, Spock pondered for a moment, because velocity was determined with relation to light speed. It was his last cohesive thought.

The lights failed and the controls in front of Spock crunched in on themselves like he bonnet of a totalled car, showering the place he had been seconds before in high-voltage sparks, and he was slammed into the front wall of the bridge along with the rest of the alpha shift crew. An ensign's arm cracked between the dual force of being thrown into the wall and Spock smashing into her. He could feel her ribs snap as the same time as one of his, as the Enterprise continued to slow and they were all pressed to the far edge of the round room.


End file.
